


Duty, Thy Name Is Sin

by Laguera25



Series: What Dreams May Come [3]
Category: Almost Human
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, Disabled Character, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-07
Updated: 2015-04-09
Packaged: 2018-03-21 18:51:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 29,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3702369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laguera25/pseuds/Laguera25
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Kennex was six months married and happy when the FBI came knocking on his door with a terrible choice.  He had the chance to bring down the Insyndicate forever, but it would mean lying to the one he loves most.  In the end, he made the only choice he thought he could.  The Insyndicate was gone, but at what price?  As Dorian says, there are some things you can't take back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Ghosts in the Mirror

**Author's Note:**

> This story is completed and edited. Subsequent chapters will be posted daily until complete.

Cuff links, brass polished to a spit shine. Starched white shirt, buttoned to the throat. Hair washed and conditioned to a high gloss and neatly combed. The smell of shaving cream and the sting of aftershave on his cheeks. The gleam of his wedding band on the third finger of his left hand. A smothering tightness in the center of his chest.

_The big day,_ he thinks bleakly as he stares into the steam-fogged mirror at the shadows under his eyes.

It's not his first commendation rodeo or even his second. Before he'd gotten his team killed in that botched raid that had stolen his leg and two years of his life, they had come at fairly regular intervals. Commendations for bravery during the XRN disaster that had nearly destroyed the department, for holding the line as the XRN had slaughtered dozens of officers and civilians. Marksmanship medals. A medal of valor for shielding a pregnant woman from her homicidal, drug-crazed husband as a beat cop. He'd accepted that one with half a dozen broken ribs under his dress blues. Each one had come with a handshake and a pat on the back from the commissioner and a burst of pride to go with the medal he pinned to his jacket, and each one had found a home inside a velvet box in his dresser drawer. They were meant to be temporary, those black velvet boxes, elegant waystations until he could commission a more fitting showpiece for his professional accomplishments, but he'd never found the time, and so they had remained nestled under his rarely-used dress socks until they hadn't mattered anymore.

None of it matters anymore. Certainly not the sliver of gold they plan to pin to his chest this morning in front of news cameras and smiling, glad-handing department bigwigs who won't remember his name the minute they leave the room. It's worthless, as worthless as all the others buried beneath his goddamn socks. He'll accept it with a handshake and a deferential dip of his chin, and then he'll bring it home to gather dust with all the rest and drink from a fresh bottle of Hennessey until the world blurs at the edges.

"Fucking worthless," he tells the hollow-eyed man in the mirror, and turns on the tap to splash cold water on his face.

_And you're going to take it anyway because it's all that you've got left,_ Anna sneers inside his head. _Poor John. Always trying to be the big damn hero, but when push comes to shove, you can never protect the ones you love the most._

_I love you so much, John. Why would you do this? Why?_ Rhea wails inside his head, and in his mind's eye, he sees her in Maldonado's office, arms wrapped around her belly as though to protect the child within it from this unexpected treachery, eyes wide and wet and rolling as she struggled to make sense of the incomprehensible.

_She never suspected a thing, the naive little idiot,_ Anna gloats, and God, how his hands itch to wrap around her throat and squeeze until the only thing left in her eyes is terror. _Not the night before you left, when you fucked her into the mattress and told her you loved over and over because you were afraid you'd never have the chance again, and not the next morning, when you let her make you toast and kissed her twice before you walked out the door to a car you were too heartsick to drive. And certainly not during those eight long days she thought you were dead, your brains splattered over the steering wheel of your squad car by two bullets from Insyndicate assassins. Love is such a sweet blindness, and she never saw it coming when you slipped that knife between her ribs and twisted it for the sake of a department that doesn't give a damn about you, that would've kicked your crippled, mind-fucked ass to the curb if it weren't for Maldonado's persistence, her insistence that you could still be a damn good cop if given half a chance._

_I guess you repaid her faith in spades, didn't you? It's just too bad you couldn't do the same for Rhea._

His stomach clenches, and his ribs ache as though the old breaks have returned, risen from the marrow of his bones as punishment for his faithlessness.

_She didn't deserve any of it,_ he thinks, and his throat constricts at the memory of her with her hand atop his casket, fingers bunched convulsively in the fabric of the flag that draped it.

_Don't let them take him from me, Dorian,_ she begged, strangled and beseeching as tears streamed down her face and a pair of cremationists hovered at a discreet distance, hands clasped and heads bowed. _It's my last chance to be with him. Don't let them take him._

_And then she broke, your steadfast ray of sunshine. The grace and poise with which she'd conducted herself in the four days since Captain Maldonado and the casualty detail burst into her office and destroyed her happy, newlywed world deserted her, and she folded in on herself and howled her grief into the tasteful sod beneath her wheels while Dorian and Maldonado stood ineffectual watch, the latter white as parchment beneath her dress blues. Because she knew. They both did. They knew the truth and didn't say a damn word while the person you love most in this godforsaken world fell apart._

_You realized what you had done then, realized just how deeply you had sunk the knife, but by then, it was too late. Duty was duty, and if you listened to the voice inside your head that was screaming for you to leave that airless, windowless bunker with its steel toilet and hotplate that managed only a sullen lukewarm, then everything would be for naught. So you stayed and saw it through, bulled through the anguished, miserable guilt that scoured your heart and sent blood and metal shavings into the back of your throat, and when there was no noise or bustle of righteous toil to distract you, you huddled in the corner of your tiny room, wedged between the grey wall and the stunted, aluminum legs of your cot, and relived that shattered, heartbroken cry._

_You hated yourself, hated the cold, merciless cruelty of the lie you had told and the immeasurable hurt it had caused, and the hatred only deepened as the days dragged on, but you told yourself it was for the best. It was hard and pitiless and savage to a soul who deserved none of it, but you told yourself it would be worth it when the Insyndicate was wiped from the face of the earth and Anna was either dead or in an isocube in the bowels of San Oakland Penitentiary. There would be time, after the arrests and debriefings, to take her into your arms and kiss away her tears and silence that awful scream. To explain everything and beg her pardon on bended knee. And she would listen and forgive, because she was Rhea, and because she loved you._

_Dorian tried to tell you, to warn you._ Don't do this, John, _he said the day Maldonado called you into her office to find a Fed in a slick, black suit with a thick dossier tucked under her arm._ You just got married, and you're having a baby. It's too much to ask. Let this go and enjoy your life, man.

_He was right; it was too much, but the Fed raised the specter of the Insyndicate coming after Rhea to get to you. They could kidnap her off the street on her way to work, beat her and torture her until the child you had so lovingly conceived slipped between her thighs in a clotted rush of red, or break her bones one by one until her body succumbed to the pain and she was left hanging from the rafters of some squalid warehouse as a warning. They could rape her and blow her brains out and send you a tape of the whole, gory spectacle, taunt you while some scumbag rocked between her thighs and she screamed for you to make it stop. That agent spun one nightmare scenario after another, and with each one, it got a little harder to breathe, until you thought you were drowning, that the last thing you'd see before you blacked out and slipped into eternity would be the framed picture of Rufus on the edge of Maldonado's desk._

_They'd taken her from you once before, you see, had come into her apartment disguised as maintenance workers and abducted her. She'd put up as much of a fight as she could with palsied arms and skinny legs and had had the wherewithal to turn on her webcam before they knocked her cold and plunged a sedative syringe into the side of her neck, but they still managed to whisk her beyond the Wall and beyond the reach of the department._

I'm sorry, John, Maldonado said when you begged her to organize a tac team and get Rhea back. _The Wall is out of police jurisdiction, and besides, we don't have eyes and ears out there. We have no idea what I'd be sending those men into. I can't risk it. Not for one person, not for a hundred._

_For God's sake, Sandra, she won't survive out there. There's no power, no medical facilities. You can't just leave her to die, _you shouted, your heart pounding inside your chest and swollen with the memory of her face on the webcam footage recovered from her apartment, stricken and terrified in the instant before a gloved fist connected with her jaw and rendered her limp and silent.__

_I'm sorry, _Maldonado repeated softly, your friend as well as your captain._ I really am. I wish the answer could be different._

_Then let it be, dammit, _you roared, and swept the picture of Rufus from her desk._ Sandra, please. I can't. Don't make me- Don't make me do this- _You couldn't finish the sentence, the final word lodged in your throat like bile.__

__Again. You couldn't do this again, couldn't open your eyes to a world in which you'd lost everything that mattered, couldn't close your eyes and see Rhea's face contorted in pain and terror. You couldn't stand to see her join the retinue of your old man and Pelham and all the rest you couldn't save._ _

_Let me go, then,_ you pleaded. I'm expendable. If I go and don't come back, all you lose is a broken-down relic nobody wants here anyway.

John-

Sandra, please. I can't just leave her and forget about her. I can't live with another ghost inside my head.

Even if I could, you wouldn't get far. You said yourself that there's no power out there, and the minute your leg lost its charge, you'd be a sitting duck, _she pointed out with exquisite gentleness._ I can't do it, John, as your friend or as your boss.

_It was Dorian who brought her back to you. While you were melting down in your lightless apartment, curled in your shower and cradling a bottle of booze and trying to figure out if you could withstand the pain and blood loss of digging your locator chip out of your thigh with a pocketknife, he was in Rudy's lab, having his pulled out and planning to go over the Wall. He left that same night, slipped over the Wall and into the darkness and tracked Rhea using the DNA signature swabbed from her apartment._

_Turned out she was in a bunker in the heart of the Old City, held captive by Nigel Vaughn and the illustrious Anna Moore and being tortured by liberal doses of neurostimulants. Excruciating, neurostimulants. When used properly, they can repair minor neurological damage like neuropathy or memory loss as a result of head trauma. You were given a dose or two after you emerged from your coma to accelerate healing of the brain and treat your motor control issues and speech aphasia, and you can still remember the liquid fire that swept through your veins, impervious to the anesthetic they'd injected into the base of your neck. It was like being boiled alive, and you refused to believe your eyes when they insisted your flesh was still attached to your bones. You passed out each time, and though you were neat and clean when you came to, you smelled the faint, telltale aromas of piss and shit and vomit._

_It was Anna who delivered the doses to Rhea, looming over her like a preening vulture and cooing at her to just help Dr. Vaughn with his project. Just a little bit of her linguistic expertise, and this could all be over. She could go home and go back to her white-picket-fine life with you. You know this because Dorian recorded it all as he stood guard, the prodigal son returned to the fold and embittered by a police force who saw him as so much walking ordinance. They tried to keep it from you, Maldonado and Dorian, but no one had told Rudy, and he let it slip one afternoon while Rhea was lying in quarantine in a hospital room, her nerve endings still sizzling from the agony so routinely and ruthlessly administered._

It's gorgeous, really, _he was saying as he jabbered about Rhea's brilliant sabotage of Vaughn's plan to hack the department's MXes and turn them against their oblivious masters._ A master stroke, I must say, _he prattled as he bustled to his computer and typed a string of commands._ It's so subtle that I never would've known to look for it if she hadn't mentioned coding being just another language when I visited her- _He stopped abruptly and tucked a strand of hair behind his ear._ -In the dim and distant past, _he finished far too loudly, and Maldonado narrowed her eyes at him._

_His gaze darted to where you stood with your elbows propped on his sorting table._ If she hadn't fallen for you, I'd've done my best to snap her up, _he said, and snapped his fingers. He smiled for a moment, and then the implication of what he'd said struck him. The smile faded, and he jammed his fingers against his lips and began to gnaw on his nails._ But since she did, our relationship is strictly platonic, of course, _he added, and swept his hands before him as though clearing his desk. He eyed you with trepidation._

Rudy. _Maldonado nudged him back to the topic at hand._ What've you got for us?

Ah. Right. _Rudy bounced on his toes and held up an exclamatory index finger._ As I was saying before I regrettably ventured into inappropriate territory, it's exquisite. Historic. The stuff of science fiction. I'm surprised she managed it, what, with being tortured nearly to death.

_Maldonado winced, and beside her, Dorian closed his eyes as though he were willing the floor to swallow him up._

Oh. Was he not aware of that, then? _Rudy asked in a small voice._

Aware of what? _you demanded, and Rudy flinched and ducked his head, a turtle retreating to the safety of its shell._

_Maldonado raised a placatory hand._ John-

No, _you snapped._ No 'John, listen.' I'm tired of fucking secrets. Secrets killed my old man and my team. I can't take any more goddamn secrets. _You rounded on Rudy, who cowered at his terminal._ So you're going to tell me, Dr. Lom, just what the hell you're talking about.

_Rudy quailed and looked to Maldonado for support, but she had developed a sudden interest in the table._ She was given three doses of a neurostimulant to...encourage her cooperation, _he admitted, and his Adam's apple bobbed convulsively._

_You thought of Rhea, small and hunched in her hospital bed and denied even the comfort of your touch because of department protocol, which demanded that she be isolated to prevent any chance of a cover-up or collusion. Just a little legacy of your colossal fuck-up with Anna Moore, when your lovesick lips and blinded eyes said too much and saw too little and got eleven men killed, and incredibly ironic in light of the ugly truth that would emerge when you kicked in the deputy commissioner's office door and unmasked the Insyndicate at last._

_You swallowed against a wave of vertiginous nausea and pressed your palms to the table to keep yourself upright._ And how the hell do you know this? _you growled, and Rudy blanched and recoiled._ Please, Detective Kennex-

Because I recorded it, _Dorian said quietly._

You what? _Incredulous._

I recorded it, _he repeated. His voice was steady, serene, but his eyes were full of regret._ It was the only thing I could think to do.

_You shook your head in disbelief._ Why didn't you stop it? _you shouted, and your fists clenched with the urge to seize the front of his shirt and shake until you rattled a circuit loose. He should've known better. He knew how much she meant to you even then, how much you loved her._

_Maldonado gamely waded into the fray again._ John, it's not that simple.

The hell it's not, _you snarled._ Jesus Christ, do you have any idea how much that hurts? How could you just stand there and watch her fucking suffer?

I didn't have a choice. If I had moved too quickly, neither of us would've gotten out. They would've killed her and wiped me. I waited until I thought we had a chance, and I took it. Believe me, John, it was the longest six days of my life, and I'm sorry I wasn't faster. For her or for you.

_Your jaw ached and twitched._ I want to see it, _you said flatly._

John, I don't think that's necessary or a good idea, _Maldonado said._ What's done is done.

I want to see it, _you insisted mulishly._ All of it. _You turned to Dorian._ You're going to show me every last frame, and if you don't, I'm going to rip it out of your circuits a frame at a time.

Kennex, that's enough, _Maldonado said, steel and granite and an indignation to rival your own, but you were past listening, past caring. All you could see was your tiny, delicate Rhea shivering beneath the covers in her hospital bed and watching you with wet, imploring eyes._

John, please, _she croaked._ I need you, sweetheart. _Thin arms snaked from beneath the covers and rose in supplication, pleading with you to breach the shimmering, blue quarantine barrier and cradle her as she had so often cradled you through countless panic attacks._

That won't be necessary, _Rudy interjected timidly._ I transferred the footage to the network for analysis.

I want to see it. If I'm going to apologize for abandoning her in the hospital isolation ward for days, then I'm going to know exactly what I'm apologizing for.

That's what I've been trying to tell you! _Rudy cried, and ran his fingers through his hair._ If only you would shut up and listen. _When all eyes were on him, he continued._ What I've found definitively proves that your Rhea- _He gestured at you with a dip of his knees._ -Miss McKinnon--wasn't in league with the nefarious Dr. Vaughn and his Insyndicate cohorts. On the contrary, she was actively working against them.

Show me, _you and Maldonado chorused in unison._

_And with that, Rudy revealed the extent of Rhea's brilliance, and the depth of her love. Vaughn had captured her so that she could invent an encryption code undecipherable by police, the Feds, or the military. He planned to use it to not only hack the department's MXes and auxiliary bots--custodians, maintenance drones--but to communicate with operatives on the ground and eavesdrop on departmental ops. After three rounds of neurostimulants, Rhea had agreed and gone to work, but what she had actually done(and under Anna and Vaughn's noses, no less)was develop a trojan horse that functioned as a kill switch for every bot into which it was uploaded. The surface code made it appear to work as ordered, but Rhea had traded on her skill as a polyglot linguist to create a virtually undetectable secondary code that would permanently shut down any bot into which it was introduced once the bot acted contrary to its original programming.. Additionally, it acted as a listening device that would allow the department to hear any Insyndicate transmissions through the infected bots. It was, as Rudy had so giddily proclaimed it, a work of genius._

I don't even know what I'm looking at, _Maldonado breathed as she stared at the neat lines of code._

A work of bloody art, _Rudy declared._ In my opinion, that is, _he amended meekly._

How did you find it if it's supposed to be undecipherable and undetectable? _Maldonado pulled her glasses from the pocket of her jacket and perched them on the bridge of her nose._

_Rudy rocked on the balls of his feet._ During a conversation that happened quite some time ago, Miss McKinnon mentioned that coding was just another language. And then, of course, it struck me that any language could be translated if you had the key, its Rosetta Stone, as it were.

And you found the key, _Maldonado surmised dubiously._

Indeed.

Where?

_Rudy made no reply. Instead, he opened a desk drew and withdrew an evidence bag containing several sheets of paper, and your stomach lurched in recognition. Rhea had been clutching them in her fist when Dorian had lowered her over the wall and into your arms. She'd been cold and semiconscious and had struggled to keep her eyes open, but her grip on those pages had been tenacious as the grave, and Dorian had had to coax them from her grasp before the paramedics had wrested her from you and spirited her to the waiting ambulance._

That's the key? _you rasped._

Yes. _Rudy reached into another drawer for a pair of latex gloves, snapped them on, and opened the evidence bag. He slipped a hand inside to retrieve the pages, but then he paused, fingers hovering over the thin paper._ It is also a love letter to you, Detective, _he said quietly, and the compassion in his eyes startled you._ I suppose it was in case she didn't make it. _He brushed a strand of hair behind his ear again and sidled from foot to foot._ I wouldn't have read it if I'd had the choice, but for what it's worth, it's beautiful. You're a very lucky man.

_Didn't you know it?_ Mind your own damn business and get to the point, _you snapped, mortified that such an intimate part of your life had fallen under a colleague's clinical scrutiny. You wanted this to be over so that you could gather Rhea to you and still her ceaseless trembling._

Yes. Yes. _Rudy pulled out the letter and spread it on the table._

_You don't remember much of his rambling discourse on computers, linguistics, and cybersemiotics, but you do remember the skim of his gloved fingertip over the paper, a lover's prophylactic caress over words meant only for you. He droned and tapped, droned and tapped, droned and tapped, and so the story unfolded in soporific percussion. Your Rhea had woven a language within a language within a language and hidden it in plain sight, in the loops and whorls of words plucked from the fabric of her heart. Pain had compelled her to obey her captors, but love had moved her to thwart them as best she could and give you and the institution you served a chance to survive._

And thus, we have the kill switch, _Rudy finished with a bobbing, triumphant flourish._

And it really would have wiped every bot? _Maldonado asked, dazed._

_Rudy raised an index finger._ With one exception.

Exception?

_Rudy nodded._ Dorian. She provided an exception in the program for DRN-167. That unit--Dorian--would shut down, but he would only go into sleep mode and could be easily rebooted without data loss.

You mean without having my mind wiped, _Dorian said drily._

Precisely.

_Maldonado was silent, hands braced on the desk as she surveyed Rudy's findings._ Jesus. _She removed her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger, and her shoulders slumped with exhaustion._ All right, _she said at last._ Go get your girl, John. Bring her home.

_You didn't need to be told twice, but before you raced to the hospital with your synthetic foot to the floor, you made good on your vow and watched the footage Dorian had so assiduously recorded from his post in the corner of the room. To his credit, Dorian watched it with you, normally-bright gaze dull as he watched the closest thing he had to a father torture the woman you loved with threats and sleep deprivation and the promise of water if she would only relent. And he watched as Rhea, who was far stronger than her body suggested, refused even as her tongue cried out for relief._

_Rhea might've been able to resist the temptation of water, but she was no match for the cruel persuasion of Anna Moore and her syringe full of neurostimulants. She fought, your tough little cookie, a tigress in a snare, but Anna was stronger and faster, and you'll never forget the sight of her with one lithe knee pressed to the back of Rhea's neck as she bucked and squirmed and clawed at the floor._

Go on and fight, _Anna sneered as Rhea writhed and sputtered beneath her weight._ It'll just make this that much more fun for me.

Bitch, _Rhea snarled, and scrabbled at the concrete floor in a futile attempt to escape._

Aw, _Anna clucked with maleficent satisfaction._ All bark and no bite. _She reached back and patted Rhea's rump as though she were an obstreperous heifer._ I have to say, you're a bit of a downgrade. But then, John is so desperate for any crumb of affection, like a stray dog. At least he was when I got to him. By the looks of things, his standards are slipping. _She smiled, vulpine and predatory, and at that moment, you would've given your soul to reach through that image and snap her neck._

Wouldn't you like to get your hands around that chick's neck? _a jeering con asked you once. You never answered him, then, too determined to put your life back together, but sitting in that room with Dorian a solicitous shadow to your right, you could have gladly answered yes._ Yes, Lord, yes, yes, yes! _Orgiastic and exultant as the cervical vertebrae of a woman you once loved disintegrated in your vengeful, crushing grip._

_And then Anna leaned forward, seized Rhea by the hair, and plunged the needle into her neck._ Welcome to fifteen minutes of hell, _Anna said, the world's most enthusiastic carnival barker ushering a mark into her tent of sordid wonders, and then she tossed the syringe aside and rose to her feet._

_For a moment, there was nothing, and then your Rhea, she of the gentle hands and the comforting voice in the dark watches of the night, began to scream. You would not hear its like again until that afternoon in Maldonado's office, when you rose from the dead and twisted the knife you had slipped beneath her ribs with that final goodbye eight days before, and you closed your eyes against it, hands clamped around the armrests of your chair._

_You thought she would black out quickly, as you had done, swamped by the black tide of agony, but she didn't. She lay on the floor and writhed, backed bowed and the cords in her neck straining as she shrieked. She pissed herself, your beautiful love who so fiercely guarded her dignity. She pissed and retched, and the bile spilled down her chin and clung to the ends of her hair in gelid runners._

_And all the while, Anna stood over her and laughed._

_You'll never forget that laugh, or forgive it, any more than you'll forgive or forget what she said the next time she brought her needle to bear, squatting over Rhea with the tip of the syringe pressed to her neck._

C'mon, Rhea, _Anna crooned in that voice that had so often turned you to putty in her duplicitous hands._ Why put yourself through this? For John? _She laughed, just a friend shooting the breeze on a lazy summer afternoon._ Let me let you in on a little secret. _She pierced the pale flesh of Rhea's throat with the tip of the needle but didn't depress the plunger. Not yet._ John's not coming. The cops aren't allowed over the Wall, and even if he wanted to defy orders and risk his precious job for you, he's kind of hobbled. You know, short a leg. _She shrugged and gave her a companionable pat on the shoulder._ They do say you take a piece of everyone you meet with you. Guess I got a little greedy. _She giggled._

Anyway, there's no white knight coming over that wall, so you might as well save yourself. Sooner or later, John'll finish licking his wounds and forget about his mousy piece of scratch-and-dent ass, and he'll marry some idiot Suzy Homemaker who thinks he hung the moon and pop out a handful of kids. You'll be just another wistful memory on the road to his apple-pie life.

_Rhea, dehydrated and starving and sore on the floor of a concrete bunker, huffed mirthless laughter._ Maybe you're right, _she croaked._ Maybe I'm already in John's rearview mirror, but before I was just another notch in his bedpost, I was his friend, so I'm not going to give you a damn thing.

Have it your way, _Anna sighed, and plunged the neurostimulant into Rhea's neck._ But just between you and me, I'm not sure John's love is worth it, _she said, and slapped Rhea on the rump, and oh, how that made your blood boil._

Lying bitch, _you thought as your vision greyed and your pulse pounded in your temples with the thunder of righteous fury, but given how things have turned out, you can't help but wonder if she were speaking with the venomous tongue of prophecy._

_Rhea spent another fifteen minutes wallowing in her own piss and vomit while the neurostimulants flayed her alive, and even after she broke to escape the pain, she found a way to keep you safe and offer you a chance to find the answers to your obsession, and you repaid that loyalty with a lie and a promise betrayed._

Don't do it, John. _A warning you should've heeded that day outside Maldonado's office, but you were blinded by the memory of Anna crouching over Rhea like a buzzard and gloating as she screamed and jerked and marinated in her own piss and by her bonelessness when Dorian placed her in your outstretched arms. You were terrified of losing her, of watching her suffer simply because she had cast her lot with you and taken your hand and your name. She was tenacious and strong and loyal, but she was also pregnant, and the thought of your child suffering for the sins of its father before it ever drew breath was too much. So you hardened your heart and stiffened your neck and did what had to be done._

Are you sure you want to do it? _Dorian asked the morning you left, your bones cold lead beneath your skin and your heart a throbbing, agonized cramp behind your breastbone._

No, I don't want to do this, _you wanted to scream, and narrowly resisted the urge to sink to your knees in the middle of the empty corridor._ I want to turn around and go back to my wife and worship her every breath. I want to wrap myself around her and rest my head on her shoulder and my hand on the swell of her stomach and imagine little fingers and toes. I want to shop for baby clothes and worry about turning the spare bedroom into a nursery. I want my happily ever after, and to be the guy she thought I was when she said yes. _But you couldn't find the strength to say any of that, so you grunted,_ I have to, _between clenched teeth and marched to the parking garage on a leg that protested all the while, advertising its failure to anyone who cared to hear it._

How can you do this? _was what he asked the next night, fresh off his sojourn at Rhea's side as the solicitous partner. He was incapable of tears, but his eyes were raw and miserable and so painfully human._

I have to, _was the only answer you could give, and his reproachful gaze twisted in your gut like a rusty blade._

_Dorian shook his head and scrubbed his face with his hands as though to wipe away the last ten hours._ I understand that this job often asks the people who do it to make personal sacrifices, many of them profound. The rate of divorce and spousal and parental estrangement among police officers nationwide is seventy-three percent. But this, John... _He shook his head again and rubbed his lips with restless fingertips._

She's not okay, John, _he said abruptly._

Of course she's not okay, _you retorted._ She thinks I'm dead.

No. That's not what I mean. Something broke inside of her, and I'm afraid something bad is going to happen.

Like what? You think she's going to try something, hurt herself? _The possibility made your stomach lurch._

No. It's more like she's going to make herself sick. I've never seen anyone cry like that, John. It scares me.

_You didn't know what he meant then, but oh, how you would learn._

Is anybody with her? _You thought of the baby, that vague, precious hump beneath her clothes._

Sam. Maldonado was, too, for a while, but Rhea threw her out. I don't think she can stand the cops right now.

_You could hardly blame her. But the news that Sam was with her was good. Sam would be steady, would keep her safe until you could get home and make things right._

She'll be all right, _you insisted with an assurance you didn't feel._ She just has to hang in there for a little while, and I'll be there.

And if she's not? _Dorian prodded._

_But that was a possibility you could not accept._ She will be.

_Dorian offered you a sad smile, and when he spoke, the sorrow in his voice made your heart ache._ I hope you're right, _he said softly._ I know I'm just an android, but even I know there are some things you can't take back.

Then your funeral, and you finally understood what he meant. You heard raw grief with every word wrenched from Rhea's throat as she sat in her chair and paid you an honor you didn't deserve, and as she hunched over your casket with her shaking, spastic fingers fisted in the fabric of the flag that draped it and begged Dorian not to let you wrest them from her, you realized that some hurts ran too deep to be mended by a hug and a kiss and a slow reunion fuck in the bed you'd left behind. 

Don't let them take him from me, Dorian. It's my last chance to be with him, _repeated inside your head on an infinite loop and always followed by that guttural bay of loss. Sometimes it woke you from nightmares or wistful dreams of holding her in your arms and falling asleep to the smell of her soft skin. Sometimes it intruded on the soporific drone of a briefing, as sudden and startling as a flash grenade, and you'd push back your chair and flee to the safety of the communal bathroom, where you'd clutch the sink and inhale the ammonia-and-chlorine stink of the urinal cake until you could crawl back into your skin. The day you burst into the deputy commissioner's office and took down the entire Insyndicate with a snap and click of your handcuffs, you passed him off to Maldonado and the gaggle of hooting, triumphant Feds, and then you went back to the precinct, locked yourself in the accessible stall of the locker-room bathroom, and had a panic attack so bad that you were sure it would kill you. You rocked and shivered and vomited everything from the toes up, and the only voice that could've drawn you out, the only arms you wanted to hold you were curled around the aching, cramping belly of a woman who thought you were dead._

_You wanted to run to her, to find her and hit your knees and beg forgiveness, but you were afraid and ashamed, and so you spent the night in the precinct rack room and showered in the locker room, and your heart was in your throat while you waited for her the next afternoon in Maldonado's office, pounding so hard that you saw colors behind your eyes._

_She refused to believe it at first, thought you were a bot._ No. No, _she insisted, eyes wet and raw and impossibly bruised inside her face._ No. John's dead. He left me that morning, and they blew off his head. _Her voice cracked, and her chest hitched with revived grief._

Ma'am, I know this may be difficult to understand, _the Fed said in the bland, condescending tone so familiar in law enforcement._ But Detective Kennex faked his death in order to assist us in an investigation.

_Rhea shook her head._ No. She curled her arms around her middle. John wouldn't do that.

It's not an action he took lightly, _the Fed went on, undeterred by her denial._ And you should know that it played a critical role in bringing down the largest criminal organization in the city.

Oh, shut up, you lying bitch! _Rhea shrieked, and burst into tears._ You're lying. I know you're lying. John loves me, and I'm pregnant, and he wouldn't-wouldn't do that to me. He wouldn't leave me, _she said doggedly, and her unswerving conviction shattered your heart inside your chest, because it should've been true._

_She began to sob._ Oh, God, I want my John, _she wailed, and began to rock to and fro in her chair._

Rhea, honey, _you began, and moved to enfold her, but she recoiled, teeth bared._

Stay away. You're not John, you fucking bucket of bolts.

It's me, sweetheart. _You dropped into a crouch and crept toward her._ I'm so sorry, Rhea. I had to.

Go fuck yourself. John wouldn't do this to me.

Rhea...

You don't get to say my name.

_You tried to slip your arms around her, but she twisted in your embrace and pushed herself backwards._ DON'T FUCKING TOUCH ME! _she roared._ You don't get to touch me. Only John gets to touch me.

I am John, _you persisted, and reached for her again._

_She flailed wildly and caught you in the nose. Blood oozed from your nostrils, and she froze, hand hovering in the air and slowly drooping on the end of her wrist like a wilting flower. Her brow furrowed, and her lips trembled._

John? _wounded and small, the faint chirp of a dazed bird._

_You answered through a constricted throat._ Yeah.

_The furrow deepened, and her lips twitched._ I don't-

It's like the Fed said, _you admitted, and rested your hand on her knee, and oh, God, why did it feel so much like the confession to an unforgivable crime?_

_Her face crumpled._ I love you, John. Why would you do this? _And then she folded in on herself and began to weep, hard, guttural, wracking sobs that terrified you with their intensity. You thought of the baby nestled in her womb._

Sweetheart, I'm sorry, _you whispered, and moved to hold her._

Don't touch me! _she howled again, and the cords in her neck stood in stark relief beneath her pallid skin._ Don't you fucking touch me! _Her chest heaved, and her eyes rolled wildly in their sockets._

Mrs. Kennex- _Maldonado began, but Rhea wouldn't hear it._

Get out! Get out! Get out! _she screamed, and never mind that it was the captain's office._

_In deference to the welfare of the child in Rhea's belly, Maldonado and the Fed vacated the premises forthwith. You tried to stay, to kneel at her feet and plead your case, flimsy as it was, but she rebuffed you with a shove._

Go on, _she hissed._ Fucking go. If you love this goddamn department so much, then let it take care of you.

Rhea, please. I know this has been hard on you, and I am so sorry. It was unfair and cruel, and you don't know how many times I wished I could take it back.

You filthy fucking LIAR! _No dazed bird now, but a cornered wolverine, bloodied and battered and bristling with seething fury._ You lied to me, _she said mournfully, and tears ran down her face._ The one person I thought never would, and you lied. I trusted you. _Anguished and broken, and each word was ground glass against your flesh._

Rhea... Oh, sweetheart, _you thought as she gulped and hitched and rocked back and forth in her chair._

I know-

No, you don't know, _she snapped, and her eyes flashed._ And even if you did, you clearly wouldn't care. _She moaned and ran her fingers through her hair._ Oh, God, I can't believe I believed you when you said I was- _She shook her head._ I can't believe I let you- _She waved her arms around her midsection, and her body rippled with a shuddering spasm._

_You wanted to throw up._ Please. Please don't say you regret that, regret me, _you thought, and sank back onto your heels._

I know I'm just an android, but even I know there are some things you can't take back, _Dorian said inside your head, and you closed your eyes against a wave of vertigo._

I had to. I had no choice.

You always had a choice! _she roared, and uttered a strangled, barking sob._ You had a choice, and you made it. So go, _she said dully, and flapped a limp hand in dismissal._

I don't want to go. I want to be with you, to make this right. _You reached for her with entreating hands._

GO! _she bellowed, and stood on her footplates, an avenging goddess rising from her throne to pronounce eternal judgment._

_What could you do but obey? You'd used up every ounce of credit you'd ever earned with her in a single stroke, and so you slunk from the room and sagged against the opposite wall. You could still see her through the blinds, arms folded over her stomach as she hunched over her knees, and then she drew a great, heaving breath and simply keened._

_The sound brought Richard from his seat like a demented jack-in-the-box, and several of the MXes clustered around the door, blank eyes turned toward the sounds of distress._

Human in distress, _they announced oh-so-helpfully, and your fingers itched to draw your service weapon and obliterate their blank faces._

_It was Richard who consoled her, who crouched in front of her chair and murmured comfort you couldn't hear and rested his hand on one thin, rounded shoulder. It was him who led her out, one hand on her push handle and the other around her trembling shoulder as she snuffled and warbled and curled her hands into white-knuckled fists in the fabric of her skirt._

What the hell is _wrong_ with you, Kennex? _he snarled contemptuously as he passed, and shook his head in disgust. To Rhea, he said,_ C'mon. I'll take you down to Rudy's for a cup of tea.

How can you do this? _Dorian asked inside your head, and in your mind's eye, you saw Anna kneeling on Rhea's back with a syringe of neurostimulant pressed to her throat._

That's what you do, John, _Anna crowed as Rhea disappeared down the corridor with that unlikeliest of guardian angels._ You destroy what you love. You got Pelham blown to pieces on your righteous crusade, and now you've torn the heart from your wife's chest. Well done, hero.

_She tried. That's the hard, ugly bitch of it. You crawled off to lick your wounds and spill your guts on Sam's couch, and Rhea came for you in the wee hours of the morning. She let you take her home and feed her Chinese takeout and give her a hot bath and listened to your useless, belated apologies, and for three weeks, she tried to let it go. She made your bed and cooked your meals and kissed you goodbye every morning and goodnight every evening. She honored the commitment she had made to you so happily six months before, when she'd been radiant and lovely in white and bridal lace._

_But it was different now. Her touch was distant, and when she looked at you, there was a careful, shuttered blankness in her eyes, a hard, bitter permafrost that smothered the light you loved so much, the light that had coaxed you back from the abyss. She scarcely spoke, and when she did, it was in absent monosyllables, and when you said,_ I love you, _her only response was a half-hearted grunt._

_The worst were her kisses. Rhea's kisses were the sweetest you had ever known, sweeter than your first, fumbling kiss at fifteen behind the bleachers. Soft and lingering and impossibly tender, the brush of a rose petal against your lips. Or hungry and urgent and fraught with unspeakable need and a passion that threatened to unhinge your knees. They were the kisses of_ I love you _and absolute trust. But after your ignominious homecoming, they were rushed and perfunctory and cold as the frost in her eyes._

I can't, _she said one night after the third failed attempt at mending fences one thrust at a time._  
Can't what? _you asked, and drew your fingertips over her bare shoulder, but you knew. It was in those terrible, dead eyes and in the inelastic dryness of a cunt that had once welcomed you so enthusiastically._

I can't pretend I'm okay, that I'm not split wide open and just trying to keep my insides in, _she mumbled, and rolled onto her side._

_You shifted beneath the blanket and molded yourself to her._ No, no, no, _you thought feverishly, and enfolded her, pressed your chest to her back and cupped her sensitive breasts._ I know I was a fucking shitheel and a merciless bastard, but it's not who I wanted to be, and it's over now.

It's who you let yourself be, _she said implacably, limp and unmoved in your desperate embrace._ You spat on the most sacred oath you'll ever make, on everything I offered you, _she went on miserably._ And I can't.

Rhea, _you murmured into her skin, imploring._ I had to.

Duty, _she said listlessly._

No, _you answered unsteadily, and swallowed around a lump in your throat._ No. I...

It's never going to be the same, baby, _came the soft reply._

Don't. Please, don't.

You made your choice. Now we both have to live with it, _she said, and cried, cold fingers curled around your encompassing hands in a bloodless grip._

_She watched you pack, seated on the bed with her fingers curled around the edge of the bed. You took as long as possible, hoping she would stop you, would reach for your hand as you passed and tell you that she'd changed her mind, but she never did. She just watched you with red-rimmed eyes and wiped tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand._

Rhea, please, _you begged, standing in front of her with a duffel bag in one hand, a suitcase in the other, and your future sifting through your fingers like dust._ I love you. Please.

_But she was implacable, as ruthless as you were when you watched the closed-circuit feed of your funeral and left her to beg Dorian for a mercy he couldn't grant. She raised her arms and hugged you._ Goodbye, sweetheart, _she whispered into your neck, and then she let you go, and the finality of it wrenched something fragile inside your chest. You've wondered since if that's how she felt when she came into Maldonado's office and got ambushed by the truth, bereft and discarded and worthless as the grit embedded in your shoes. The possibility haunts you, drives you to your knees in front of the john in the middle of the night, and you know you'll never be sorry enough._

Now he's here, four months on and right back where he started, sleeping in a bed he'd never thought to see again and fucking into his fist with his eyes screwed shut so he won't have to see the ugly, idiotic bob of his stump.

_She thought it was beautiful,_ he remembers dully as he inspects his nails for dirt. _She thought_ I _was beautiful._

_...some things you can't take back,_ Dorian says inside his head, and he shuffles from the bathroom and into the bedroom.

_Synthetic integration failed,_ his prosthesis chirps from beneath his uniform pants.

"Fuck you," he grunts. He scoops his uniform jacket from the bed and drapes it over his arm, and then he goes into the living room and approaches his smart wall. One tap wakes it from sleep, and he scrolls to the message app, hoping to see a message scrawled in Rhea's pained, unsteady hand, but the wall is obdurately blank.

_Synthetic integration failed,_ his leg informs him.

_A whole lot of integrations have failed,_ he thinks morosely, and touches his finger to the screen.

_Hi, Rhea,_ he writes. _Today's the big day._ He considers adding a smiley face, but doesn't. I'd love to see you there. Love, John. He sends it to her wall with a swipe of his finger.

He's sent the same message once a week since he'd received the commendation notice a month ago. The response is always the same. Nothing.

His finger hovers over the screen. _I'm thinking of you. I love you._ Sent. This one he sends every day, and it, too, is met with silence.

He putters around the living room and wills the wall to chime with an incoming reply, but it never does. His watch, however, beeps to remind him that the hour grows late, and so he adjusts his jacket over his arm and trudges to the door. There's a piece of gold waiting for him on the other side, and all it cost him was everything.

The corridor is empty when he steps into into it and crosses to the door that had once opened into his happily-ever-after. He hesitates a moment, and then he gathers his tattered courage and knocks.

"Rhea?" he calls. "It's me." He bends his head to listen, but there's nothing. No muffled reply, no rumble of wheels over hardwood. Just the furtive click of claws and an inquisitive snuffle from behind the door. "Hey, Linc," he says, and receives an amiable whuff in reply.

"I don't know if you're home, or if you can hear me, but I love you."

Linc whines adoringly.

He sighs and rests his forehead against the door for a moment, and then he straightens and gives it a doleful pat.

_Synthetic integration failed,_ his leg drones as he limps down the hall and into the subdued morning light.

To his surprise, he finds her in the parking garage. Their life together might've fallen apart, but their cars still occupy adjoining bays. She's sitting between them, with her brakes set, and a medbot in white scrubs bustles around her modified, red four-door.

"Morning, John, she says at his approach, and his name on her lips makes his heart ache with longing.

"Hey," he says, and stuffs his hands into his pockets. "I was, uh, I was just at your place. I wanted to ask if you wanted to come today." He rocks back on his heels, and his leg protests from beneath the fabric of his pants.

She offers him a wan smile. "Got somewhere to be this morning." She nods at his leg. "It giving you trouble this morning?"

"Eh." He flaps a dismissive hand. "Just being a pissy bastard." He rocks and shifts his leg in an effort to silence it. "You look good. Big meeting today?"

_Good,_ he scoffs. She looks beautiful, round-cheeked and rosy with the bloom of second-trimester pregnancy and dressed in a deep green, tailored maternity dress that flatters her distended belly and accentuates the blue of her eyes and the spun gold of her hair. 

"Thanks. You're not looking too bad yourself," she says, and gestures at his dress blues.

He shrugs. "Protocol." And oh, Christ, she's so damn beautiful.

_You made your choice. Now we both have to live with it._ His eyes burn.

The medbot rounds the car. "Are you ready to enter the car, Mrs. Kennex?" it asks.

"Give me a minute, Jake."

"Jake? You're calling it Jake?" he says incredulously as it steps back and waits, hands slack at its sides.

She shrugs. "He needed a name. Dorian has one."

"Yeah, well, Dorian's Dorian. That's an animated Ken doll. When did you get it, anyway?"

"Just after my twentieth week. I couldn't bend over anymore, and you know what the obstetrician said about the increased risk of falls and amniotic rupture because of the strain my transfers put on my abdominal wall. So, Jake it is."

He glowers at the medbot, which gazes back impassively.

"I could help you," he grumbles. "I _should_ help you. I'm your husband, for Christ's sake."

"Yeah, well, we both know you can't. Your hours are too unpredictable, and I can't sit around for hours, waiting for help to pee. Your girl is heavy."

_Your girl._ His chest tightens at the casual acknowledgment of his paternity of the child in her belly.

_We were so happy those first few months, before the job came calling and fucked everything up. She was scared shitless but determined to be brave, and I was over the goddamn moon. A kid. Finally, after all these years. Hell, before Rhea came along and loved me blind, I thought I'd missed my chance, but suddenly, there it was on that first sonogram, no bigger than a castor bean. No sex, no defining characteristics, just a blob attached to the wall of Rhea's uterus, but it was the whole damn world. My family, my future, my fucking white picket fence._

_I drove everybody crazy the first few weeks. Rhea couldn't move for my hovering, and Dorian became a pack mule when I made him carry her to the car every time she visited the precinct. I made him read me every goddamned pregnancy book known to man and Googled special-needs pregnancy every day. You know, just in case there'd been a breakthrough in the past twenty-four hours. I paid for consultations with specialists out of pocket and stocked the apartment with prenatal vitamins and craving food. I started keeping a bowl by the bed in case she got sick before she could get to the toilet._

_And Rhea felt so loved. I know she did because I saw it in her face. I was the guy she thought I was when she married me, and she hummed constantly, that happy trill I miss so goddamn much. She thought she was safe, as sacred as the life she held inside her, and we were both getting ready for the second trimester, for midnight ice cream runs and back rubs and aquarobics._

_And then the job came and shattered Rhea's heart and all my good intentions, and I heard my daughter's heartbeat from a chair in the corner of the room while Rhea gripped the sides of the narrow exam table and kept her gaze fixed on the screen and the ultrasound tech pretended not to feel the crushing tension in the room. I saw her face the same way, in a chair across the room with my hands fisted between my knees._

_Now she's seven months gone, and I'm standing in a fucking parking garage, the odd man out while some Ken doll manhandles my wife._

He clears his throat. "You, uh, you doing okay?"

She shrugs. "I'm tired a lot, but my maternity leave starts in a few weeks, so that should help." She sighs and scratches her forearm. "My next appointment is in two weeks if you want to be there."

"I do." Thin and strangled, and he turns his head and blinks to clear his eyes.

When he turns back, she's right in front of him. "I want you there, you know. She's your girl, too." She reaches up to straighten his tie.

_I just wish you wanted me everywhere else._ "I just want to be part of this." His gaze drops to the hard, protuberant dome of her belly.

"John, you're always going to be a part of this. You helped me make her." She drops her hands and places one of his on her belly.

A shuddering breath escapes him. "I just wish-I just wish things were different. This isn't-"

"Mrs. Kennex, if we do not leave now, we will not reach our destination in time," the medbot interjects officiously, and it takes all of his willpower not to break his hand on its face.

"Would you shut the fuck up?" he snarls, and his throat aches with the urge to weep.

"Would you like to help me into the car?" she asks quietly.

The question takes him by surprise. It's the first time she's asked for his help since the apartment door closed behind him. "Sure," he says eagerly. "Just let me set down my coat."

Predictably, his prosthesis picks that moment to sound its monotonous warning. _Synthetic integration failed._

Her gaze sharpens, and he knows she's seeing his leg buckling beneath him and spilling them both to the concrete.

"Goddamn piece of shit," he mutters furiously.

He gasps when her hands encircle his thigh and begin to knead the hard knot of muscle. 

"I've got you if you want to adjust."

_She's touching me. My Rhea is touching me._ It's dazed and disbelieving, and it takes a moment for her words to register. When they do, he shifts his weight to his good leg and jiggles the prosthesis. 

_Synthetic integration failed,_ the voice insists truculently.

"Fuck."

"Here, let me," she says, and slides her bracing hands to his wayward coupling. She nudges it into alignment, and it slides home with a click.

"Thanks." He bounces to test its stability.

"A favor for a favor. You ready?"

"Just a sec." He turns and tosses his dress coat into the backseat of his car. "Okay," he says, and rounds to the side of her chair.

"Jake, grab the passenger door?" she calls over her shoulder, and he's dimly aware of movement.

He bends at the knees and slides one arm around her shoulders and the other behind her knees. "Ready when you are," he says, and God help him, he can smell her perfume, light and citric and intoxicating.

She holds up her arms, and he lifts her from the chair with the airy fart of her gel cushion. She's in his arms for the first time since that terrible March morning when he'd told the truth and sealed it with a reverent lie, and he can't breathe. His chest aches with longing, and he can smell her hair and feel the warmth of her hand on his nape.

_You've held her like this before,_ murmurs a forlorn voice inside his head. _The night you got married, you lifted her from her chair with the same care, the same yearning awe. She was delicate and beautiful, and she was yours. There was still rice in her hair when you laid her on the bed in the honeymoon suite and brushed trembling fingers over her cheeks. She was a goddess, and she loved you, and you'll never forget the flutter of her eyelashes as you skimmed your fingers over her thigh and pulled down the silk panties she'd worn for the occasion._

_You held her again when you stepped over the threshold of the apartment as man and wife for the first time ten days later, relaxed and happy and with the kiss of Napa Valley wine still on your tongues._

Welcome home, Mrs. Kennex, _you crowed, and kissed her while the sunlight streamed in through the living room window, and your heart added an unspoken corollary._ Welcome to happily ever after.

_I'm so sorry,_ he thinks. _I miss you so fucking much._ But the words won't come, lodged in his throat like a purging finger. His lips twitch with the shape of her name, but all that emerges is a rattling breath.

"Your seat is ready," the medbot announces, and John would cheerfully punch it through the nearest concrete pylon.

"You're not driving?" he asks as he settles her into the passenger seat with painstaking care.

"Stomach's too big. If there were an accident, it might hit the steering wheel." She rubs her distended belly.

The thought makes his own stomach drop. "Is the passenger seat any safer?"

"No steering wheel last time I checked," she answers blandly.

"No, I know. I just...want you to be safe. If anything happened..." He leaves the thought unfinished, terrified he'll invoke dark and capricious gods should he let it pass his lips. 

"You know I'd never do anything to endanger the baby. Taking unnecessary risks are your department."

He snorts. "Can I do anything else?"

"Help me with the seatbelt? Water weight has made my fingers clumsier than usual."

He ducks his head inside the car and pulls out her seatbelt, and then he leans over her to slip it into the buckle. The tightening mechanism whirrs, and he holds his breath until it stops, sure it's going to strangle his unborn child.

"Thanks. I appreciate the help." She adjusts a thick square of wool that's been velcroed around the belt where it meets her swollen midriff.

"Hey, anytime." Emphatic and incredibly eager. "You need anything else?"

She shakes her head. "I'm good."

"Good. Good," he says stupidly. He's desperate to cup her cheek or rest his hand on her stomach, but he doesn't want to sour this fragile amiability, and so he retreats and closes the door. "You let me know if you need anything." He drums his hands on the window well.

"I will."

He doesn't want her to go. "You sure you don't want to come?"

A rueful smile. "Places to go."

"Yeah." He runs his fingers through his hair. "You have a good day, all right?"

"You, too. It's a big day for you."

"Yeah," he says thickly, and turns his head. "Yeah."

"Mrs. Kennex, if we do not leave now, there is zero possibility that we will reach our destination on time," the medbot says from the driver's seat.

_Go fuck yourself,_ he thinks savagely.

"You heard the man. Gotta go."

"Man, my ass," he mutters peevishly, but he lets go of the window well. "You drive safely," he barks.

The medbot is unfazed.

She waggles her fingers at him. _Bye,_ she mouths.

He steps back and watches them pull out, and as the car drives out of the garage, he raises his hand to his forehead in a two-fingered salute. There is no discernible response from the shadow in the passenger seat.

He watches until the car turns out of sight, and then he laces his fingers behind his head and rocks back on his heels. His thigh tingles with the memory of her touch, and the scent of her shampoo lingers in his nostrils, though it's rapidly fading beneath the onslaught of gasoline fumes.

_I thought she'd come. I thought that when push came to shove, she'd be there._

_Just goes to show what an idiot you are,_ Anna jeers. _What made you think she'd want to sit there and watch them kiss your ass for tearing her apart?_

_I know I'm just an android, but even I know there are some things you can't take back._

He turns on his heel and stalks to his car, and then he jerks open the driver's door and slumps into the driver's seat.

"Big fucking day," he grunts morosely, and slams the door.

_Just get through it,_ he tells himself, and curls his hands around the steering wheel. _Just be a good little officer and stand at attention while they spew their meaningless bullshit, and after they pin that fucking medal to your chest, you can come home and drink yourself blind, and if you end up on your knees in front of the toilet, wrestling your demons, then it's no less than you deserve._

He pries a hand from the steering wheel and reaches for the key as it juts from the ignition. The gold of his wedding band catches his eye, and he pauses, throat tight and dry.

_Go on, John. Trade one bit of gold for another._

"Fuck." Cracked and brittle. "Fuck, fuck, fuck." He drops his outstretched hand to his lap and raises it again and starts the car before he loses his nerve and sits here until long after the ceremony is over. 

"Just get through it," he croaks. "It's all you've got left anyway."

He throws the car into reverse with unsteady hands and drives out of the garage, and the promise of bourbon rises in his throat.


	2. Every Dance Starts With a Single Step

Her first impulse is to turn around, simply spin on her wheeled axis, go back to the car, and take refuge in her office. It's all brass buttons and blue wool, and the last thing she wants is to be surrounded by self-congratulatory windbags feting themselves on a job well done when most of them had never set foot outside their plush offices. She's keenly aware of the baby in her belly, low and heavy and pressing against her ribcage, and if she's not mistaken, there is a tiny foot stamping on her bladder. But she rolls doggedly forward and into the ballroom.

_Just find a spot in the back, behind the cameras and gawping relatives snapping photos. No one needs to know you're here, and if you get tired of listening to the circle-jerk, you can duck out with no one the wiser._

This sensible plan is immediately thwarted by Dorian, who hurries toward her, white-gloved hands outstretched. "Rhea," he says with quiet effusiveness. "It's so good to see you."

"Likewise," she replies neutrally. In truth, she doesn't give a fig one way or the other about Dorian or anyone else in the befrigged SFPD. The bastards had looked her in the eye while she'd been strangling on her grief and wondering just how she was supposed to raise a child without John's loving, steady support and lied. They had let her think that he was dead, had refused her his leg and his wedding band and let her weep over an empty casket. They had let her lurch home to an empty apartment with a head so heavy she couldn't lift it and let her wail her grief to the walls.

_And you did wail, didn't you?_ whispers the voice of bitter, uneasy memory. _Maldonado and her casualty crew waltzed into your office with Dorian on their heels and tore your world apart, and they they left you to pick up the pieces with blind fingers. Dorian drove you home, and all you could do was scream and scream in the passenger seat, hands balled into fists._

Breathe, Rhea, Dorian said as he drove. As if it were that simple. Breathe. It's...it's all right.

_You couldn't find the words to remonstrate with him, to point out the ridiculousness of such a statement when the news of John's murder still echoed in your ears. That required strength you didn't have and air you couldn't spare, so you simply blinked at him and howled while snot and tears dripped down your face and salted the back of your throat._

_And even if you could've stopped, could've smothered the grief that bubbled and welled from the pit of your stomach, it would've won the moment you rolled into your apartment. John was still everywhere you looked. In the wedding holograph that held pride of place in the living room. In his dress blues hanging on the rack in the bedroom. In his clothes in the dresser drawers and his favorite running shoes peeking from beneath the bed. In his cologne and a scattering of bitcoins that he'd pulled from his pocket and dumped onto the dresser. In his shampoo in the shower and the medbag that still hung from the towel rack. In the shows he'd programmed into the DVR weeks in advance and the messages left on your wall._

_You read them over and over again, each one a fresh cut upon your bared and harrowed soul, and you watched the handful of vid messages you'd been too lazy to erase until your vision blurred and your eyes throbbed and the words and images seared themselves into your mind._

_John in the cruiser, Dorian humming in the passenger seat and Elton John on the radio._ Hi, sweetheart. It looks like I caught another case, so I won't be home until late, but I can pick up some things from the all-night bodega. You need anything? Send me a list. Love you.

_John in the precinct bullpen, feet propped on his desk and teeth worrying the end of a hapless stylus._ It's me. Just wanted to check that you were feeling okay. The morning sickness was pretty rough this morning. How about I bring you some triple chocofudge ice cream tonight? At least that'll taste good coming back up. Gotta go. Love you. _A fleeting kiss offered to the screen._

_John in the cruiser, alone, with nothing but the sound of the engine and the hum of rubber on asphalt. Eyes shadowed and red-rimmed with fatigue and a Styrofoam cup of coffee in one hand._ Hey, it's me. I, uh, I don't have a reason to call. It's another late night, and I just wanted to say I love you. I'll be home as soon as I can.

Paging Dr. Kennex:) _scrawled on your wall when you checked your messages over lunch at your desk._

Just thinking about you, _left as a post-it note on his pillow when the job called him out before you woke in the morning._

_Pieces of John, fragments of the life you'd built together, and, unsatisfied, the vultures tried to take them from you, too. Maldonado asked for his dress blues a day after he died, For the funeral, she said, never mind that the casket would be closed. Not enough left of John's head to patch it together, you see, which is why they refused to let you see the body down at the morgue. Or so they told you when you begged to see him, to see for yourself that he was really gone. You were tempted to refuse them as they had refused you such a feeble comfort, but you could not deny John the honor that he had earned, so you took his blues off the rack and pressed your nose to the thick wool in an effort to find some trace of him in the stiff, dry-cleaned fabric, and then you reluctantly turned it over to an ashen Maldonado with a sob locked behind your teeth._

_His cologne, too, they wanted, those grasping bastards who wouldn't even give you his badge until Dorian brought it to you the night before the funeral, polished to a high shine to remove all traces of John's brains and shattered skull. So you gave them the bottle he kept on the bathroom counter next to his shaving cream and the Aqua Velva, and when Maldonado had fled with bits of John in her grasp like spoils of war, you lurched to your car like a slaloming drunk and drove to the pharmacy for another bottle. Not the smartest move you've ever made, but you were past thought, burning from the inside out with a yawning grief that left room for nothing else. It's a wonder you didn't fall on your face in the pharmacy parking lot and simply lie there, sobbing into the greasy asphalt with your fingers curled around your footrests, but you made it inside and to the fragrance aisle. You swayed in your chair and blinked at the shelves without really seeing them, and then you picked up a bottle of New Spice Black Label Special Reserve, and burst into tears._

I want my John, _you wailed, and clutched the bottle as if it were the ruin of a priceless treasure, hunched and caterwauling while the befuddled clerk sidled uncertainly at the end of the aisle and the pharmacist eyed you from his Lexan fortress and reached for his com._

_You were still there when the MX found you, clutching that damn bottle like it was the ruby of Burma and hacking on your own snot._

Mrs. Kennex, _it said_. What is the nature of your distress?

_You goggled at it in bereaved stupefaction._ My husband is dead, _you wanted to scream at it._ He got his brains blown out in his own squad car, and he's never coming home. _But the images the thought inspired provoked a dull nausea. You thrust the bottle at it as though it explained everything._ I want my John, _you said weakly._

_The MX looked at the bottle with dead, rugose eyes._ I am sorry for your loss, Mrs. Kennex, _it said with polite, programmed sympathy, and then it led you out of the store and took you home, the action noted in its log as_ courtesy escort for MOP. 

_They took more and more of him every day. Copies of his academy graduation photo for the memorial service, along with more recent photos of him on training ops with assault and apprehension teams. They displaced more of him every time they crossed the threshold and breathed their worthless condolences into your face, replaced him with their unfamiliar and unwanted scents, impersonal and strange and so not John that your flesh crawled even as you shook hands and inclined your head in acknowledgment of their kindest intentions. By the day of his wake, he was all but gone, driven out by their benign intrusion, and you sat on the couch with a damp Kleenex wadded in your fist and let their words wash over you like white noise and sought for him beneath the cloying aromas of green bean and potato casseroles you had no desire to eat._

_Sometimes you needed him so badly that you rolled into the bathroom and crawled into the shower, where you sat with your nose pressed against the fiberglass. He had spent hours in that shower, sweating out his demons and listening in the dark. You had washed him in that shower, fingers slick with soap as he purred at the sloppy rake of your nails. You'd loved him in that shower, clinging to his shoulders while he held you in his strong, tireless arms and rocked you to the rhythm of his slippery, sinuous hips, and when you got pregnant, he'd held you in that shower while the nausea turned your guts inside out. It was one of the few places where strangers had not tread, and you thought to pull some precious remnant of him from the tile and fiberglass. You laid in the shower until your burgeoning maternal instinct drove you out, and all you ever smelled was the grout and the sour tang of your own sweat._

_Sometimes you wore his cologne and his old shirts, the ones you hadn't washed before he died. They still smelled like him, like cologne and aftershave and coffee and glazed pastry. Like warm skin and spicy noodles. The navy-blue one was his favorite, and you wore it under your dress the day of his funeral. It was like being held by him one last time, and it was the only reason you made it through that eulogy, when every word emerged from your mouth with blood and sorrow on its ragged edges. You wore it to the wake, too, as armor against his colleagues' distant, awkward sympathy and his friends' guilty, red-eyed sorrow. And when they were gone, and the apartment was still and quiet and swollen with his absence, you cried yourself to sleep in it and dreamed that he was with you still._

_But time is inexorable, and John kept fading. You could spray his cologne all day long, until the air reeked of it, but it would never provide more than a glimpse of the man you had lost--the shell of his ear, his jawline in profile, the flash of his eyes. The unwashed shirts were finite in number, and eventually, they smelled like you, stale and bitter and musty, a life neatly folded and forgotten inside an old footlocker.._

_Two days before John returned from the dead like a holstered Lazarus and blew your world apart a second time, Sam found you in the bedroom, howling to beat the band over his pillow._

I can't smell him anymore, _you sobbed at her as she stood in the doorway._ They took my John from me! _You're not sure if you meant the cowards who had put two in the back of his head and splattered his brains all over his cruiser or the people who had erased him from your life one handshake and shoulder pat at a time. It hardly mattered; gone was gone, and despite your pleas and prayers, John was never coming home._

_God knows what Sam must've thought as she stood in the doorway and watched you clutch his flat pillow. She was wrestling with her own loss and too stiff-necked to collapse under it. Maybe she thought you'd lost your mind along with your husband, or maybe she thought you were having a miscarriage, bleeding the last of her brother down your trembling, spasming legs. In truth, sometimes you think it might've been kinder if you had. The baby would've gone on to the arms of its father, and if you were lucky, you'd've followed swiftly after, released from a life you no longer wanted and spared the agony of trying to explain a father to a child who would never know him._

_But you're tougher than you want to be, and the baby is as stubborn as her daddy, so there was no choice but to go on. You cried yourself sick that night, cried and rocked like a crazy woman with your arms around your middle while Sam hovered in the doorway, reluctant to invade a space so sacred, but the next morning, you put your feet on the floor and went on living, staggering through the pain like a Bedouin bent against a dust storm because the child you carried was all that was left of a better man than the world deserved after what it had done to him, and you didn't want him to be disappointed when you came crawling through those pearly gates with nothing but the weight of your years and the scars they'd left behind._

_Those are the sins you cannot forgive, that hardened your heart against the man you love with every warped and gnarled fiber of your being. The initial deceit hurt, yes, stole your breath and fractured a trust once absolute, but it was the thousand indignities that followed that made it unendurable. John never understood, bless his soul, not even when you cast him out. That he was sorry, you have no doubt; for all his swagger and bluster, John is a gentle, tender-hearted soul, but he was sorry for all the wrong reasons. He was sorry for lying and for leaving, but he didn't know to be sorry for anything else, for all the nightmares you saw when you closed your eyes, for bottles of cologne clutched in the middle of drugstore aisle, and for pillows that didn't hold his scent. So no matter how sorry he was, he could never be sorry enough._

_John can, perhaps, be forgiven. He was blinkered by the call of duty and did not see, did not know. The others have no such excuse; they knew the truth and let you go on screaming, not in an act of desperate, misguided love meant to protect, but from simple, cold expedience. They watched you suffer and didn't do a damn thing about it, and it will be a cold day in hell before you forgive them for it._

Dorian's eyes dim at her coolness, but he offers her a dogged smile. "Let's get you a seat down front."

"Actually, I'm just going to stay back here."

"But you won't be able to see anything."

"The view's fine," she said mulishly.

"You're behind Tripod Row," he points out, undaunted. "And even if you can see now, your view will be obstructed the minute the ceremony starts."

"It's fine. Besides, I don't want Jake distracting from the honorees."

"He's a medbot, not a sexbot. Besides, John won't be able to see you back here."

_That's the idea,_ she thinks peevishly, but she nods and lets him lead her to the front of the room, Jake sedate on her heels.

"Thank you, MDX-472," Dorian says crisply. "I can handle it from here."

"Mrs. Kennex requires constant monitoring at this stage of her pregnancy," Jake says.

"Which I am fully capable of providing as a DRN and a member of law enforcement," Dorian retorts. "Should an emergency arise, I can have an ambulance here in under a minute. Not to mention her husband will vault the stage if he has to."

_Her husband._ Her throat constricts. "It's fine, Jake. Go wait in the back, please. I'm sure you're capable of monitoring my vitals from that distance."

"Affirmative." Jake cocks his head at her for a moment, and then he turns and retraces his steps up the aisle.

Dorian escorts her to the middle of the front row. "Excuse me, sir," Dorian says to a pudgy, middle-aged man in a tweed jacket. "May I have that seat? This is Mrs. Kennex, and I'd like her to have a good seat."

"Dorian," she protests, mortified. "It's all right, sir. You were here first."

The man takes in her distended belly and the wheels under her ass, and the mingled pity and fascination in his gaze makes her wish the ground would open up and swallow him whole.

_Probably wonders how John managed that,_ she muses peevishly. _With a great deal of enthusiasm. Asshole._ Then, _He always loved me with enthusiasm. Every time._

She doesn't want to look at him anymore, this man with the pitying, prurient eyes, doesn't want to remember John's touch, so ardent and worshipful. But there's no way to retreat with dignity, so she holds her ground and his gaze and waits for the moment to pass.

"Sure, sure," the man says. He takes his glasses off and puts them on again, and then he springs to his feet and scurries further down the row.

The minute his ass vacates the seat, Dorian removes the chair and steers her into the vacant slot.

"Don't ever do that again." She sets her brakes with a snap of her wrists.

"Do what?" Dorian asks innocently.

"Use my delicate condition to guilt people into giving up their seats. Or anything else, for that matter."

"The possibility of you being here is all John's talked about since news of this commendation came down," Dorian says, and sits down beside her. "There's no way you're not going to be front and center."

"I'd be just as here on the end of the row," she points out.

"Yeah, but you need to be the first thing he sees. You've been the only thing on his mind since the day he took this assignment."

She snorts. _Then why the fuck did he take it in the first place?_ She changes the subject. "So why aren't you up there? You had just as much to do with this as he did."

He shrugs. "I'm classified as assistive technology. They made a notation in my file, but assistive technology is ineligible for commendation." He studies the potted fern on the floor to the left of the lectern.

"Horseshit," she says bluntly.

Dorian's lips twitch in a humorless smile. "John thought so, too. Even went to Maldonado about it, but her hands were tied."

_Of course they were. Just like they were tied when the two of you stood over me while I screamed into the sod next to my husband's casket._ "John has some common sense now and then."

"He loves you, Rhea. It means the world to him that you're here."

She shifts in her seat. "Yeah, well," she says brusquely, "I wasn't going to let him come out to another goddamn empty chair."

_And that's why you're here, isn't it? Because before you were his lover or his wife, you were his friend, his patient voice in the dark, and you'll never forget the pain in his voice whenever he talked about coming to in that lonely, unfamiliar hospital room and finding nothing waiting for him but an empty chair. Even years later, when he'd accepted Anna's deception and taken it into himself as yet another scar to go with his stump and the ridge of scar tissue on his shoulder, the hurt would creep into his voice whenever he spoke of it, a recurrent infection he could never quite beat. Mad as you are, you can't ask him to relive that humiliation and anguish again, to emerge into the light and find nothing waiting for him._

_And you're here because he tried. He tried so hard to make it right. The night you took him home from Sam's place, he placed you in the car with trembling hands, and then he drove to your favorite noodle shop and bought everything he thought you_ might _like. It was more than four people could eat, let alone two, but he didn't care. He only wanted to make you happy, to offer you your favorite things as a token of his love. Just like he drove to an all-night bodega and bought you ice cream and chocolate and a stupid, dancing sunflower that held out its petals and sang "You Are My Sunshine."_

_He took the whole lot home and fed you himself, held you on his lap and coaxed food past your lips with an infinite patience none would believe._

Come on, sweetheart, eat something for me, _he crooned, and stroked your hair as he held up a bite of beef lo mein pinced delicately between wooden chopsticks._ C'mon, you and the baby need to eat. _Ragged and unsteady, and he swayed in the chair, one arm tucked around your abdomen._

I know. I know, _he soothed and rocked with you as you struggled to swallow past the lump in your throat, because oh, my God, he was here, and he was solid, and all you could smell was his cologne._ I know. It's all right. I'm so sorry. So sorry, sweetheart. _Strangled and pleading._

_And all you could see was that drugstore aisle, standing there with a bottle of New Spice in your hand while an MX offered indifferent condolences on a loss it could never understand._

Hey. Hey, _he said when a bite of shrimp teriyaki failed to go down for the third time, and tears dripped off your chin._ Oh, God. Hey, my Rhea. Sssh. Don't. Look. _He reached out and picked up the stupid sunflower from the center of the table. He pushed the button on the side, and it began to sing, eyes blinking._

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, _it warbled, and extended its petals like a hopeful infant reaching for its mother._

I saw it in the store, thought you might like it, _he said._

You make me happy when skies are grey, _it supplied, shrill and manic._ You'll never know, dear, how much I love you. So please don't take my sunshine away, _it finished, and you burst into tears, because he had, in fact, taken your sunshine away._

_He dropped the chopsticks and the flower and gathered you close._ I know, sweetheart. I know, and I'm sorry, okay? Oh, Rhea, I'm so sorry. _He rocked and crooned and rubbed your arms, because you were cold as corpse flesh._

_He tried so hard that night. When you couldn't get solid food past the lump in your throat, he spoonfed you egg-drop soup and murmured apologies and endearments with every bite, and when you turned your face from the spoon, he carried you into the shower and bathed you with solicitous, tender hands._

There's my girl, _he soothed as he massaged shampoo into your scalp._ It's going to be all right now. It's over. It's done, sweetheart.

_You wanted to believe him, to accept the warmth he offered, but all you could feel was the cold, dead solidity of his casket beneath your palm._

Please, Dorian. Don't let them take him from me. _A pair of cremationists hovering on the periphery of his gravesite like deferential vultures. Your fingers clawed in the fabric of the flag draped over his casket._

It's over now, _those lovely lips promised, and if those words had come just eight days sooner, you would have taken them as law, but those lips had proven themselves capable of deceit, and so you did not trust them, not with promises, and not with the kisses he pressed to your face and lips._

I got you now, honey, _he said as he toweled you dry and slipped your warmest nightgown over your head._ It's over, it's over, it's over.

_He picked you up and nestled you deep in your bed, and then he climbed in behind you and curled around you in a protective coil._ I'm here, _he whispered, and carded his fingers through your damp hair._ I'm here, baby.

_But you had believed that before, too, had woken in the night convinced you were in the shelter of his cocooning embrace, only to find you were alone, cradled by dust and shadow. It broke your heart afresh each time, harrowed a soul already bruised and raw and struggling to endure. So you refused to believe the evidence of your eyes, to place your faith in the pliant, sleepy heaviness of him at your back. You fought sleep as long as you could, until your eyes were as heavy as the child settled in your belly, and even after you succumbed to sleep, awareness lingered just beneath the surface, a nascent waking dream that never came into focus._

_For three weeks, he tried to undo the damage, to soothe the hurt that seethed beneath your skin. He kissed you awake every morning to tell you he loved you before duty came to call and carried him out the door, and more often than not, he texted you from the precinct--a joke, a goofy animal picture, a simple emoji. And always an_ I love you. _He came home as soon as he could every day, and rarely was he empty-handed. Flowers, chocolates, a book you mentioned in passing during idle chatter on your honeymoon. Lotions for your dry skin and stretch marks and peppermint and chamomile tea to soothe your nerves. He can't cook, bless his soul, but he brought you the world in takeout bags. Chinese and Italian, Japanese and barbecue, pad thai and Korean barbecue._

_He invited you to dinner and watched movies with you on the couch, courted you all over again as best he could. He held your hand and stroked your face and nuzzled your ear and told you you were beautiful, his lovely Rhea. He burbled about booties and baby blankets and upcoming obstetrician's appointments._

I'll be there with bells on, _he assured you, and drew you close._ We'll put this behind us and get back to being a family. _So hopeful, so sure that love could right the terrible wrong that he had done._

_But he could not see the wound he had inflicted, could not guess its terrible scope, and all you could feel was the fiberglass of the tub beneath your ass as you tried to sniff him out of the walls and the nap of the wool beneath your bloodless fingers as you held his dress blues and sought for his scent at the collar and waited for Maldonado to strip them from you just as she had ripped away the rest of him. They blotted out everything else, smothered love and desire and forgiveness, ash strewn over a once-fertile valley. When you looked at him, you saw only his absence, heard only his pretty lies, and whenever he reached for you, your skin rippled with the memory of his touch the night before he left, so ardent and worshipful and duplicitous._

I love you, Rhea, _he'd breathed against your skin as his hips surged and drove his cock into your welcoming cunt. His hand a reassuring cup at your nape as he laved the hollow of your throat with the point of his tongue and nipped and worried the delicate flesh with his teeth._ So beautiful. _His hands on your hips and his mouth on your nipple as the bedsprings creaked and the breath tore from him in ragged, throaty gasps._

_He'd always been passionate and attentive, dedicated to your satisfaction, but you'd seldom seen him hungrier or more wanton. Your wedding night, perhaps, when the fetters of circumspection were newly fallen. He was gentle, but there was a fire in his touch that stole your breath long before he sank himself into you and began to thrust, and not even climax could quench it. He took you again and again, left his fingerprints and the memory of his lips on the flesh of your hips and thighs. He was insatiable and indefatigable and so much more vocal than usual. It was glorious, and you felt like a goddess at his every caress. You have seldom felt so loved._

_And the next morning, he left you with a lie and a devil's kiss and destroyed a memory that should have been among your most treasured._

_He tried even after you turned him out. In fact, he redoubled his efforts. He never came over uninvited, never foisted himself into the space you created for yourself amid the wreckage of your all-too-brief married life, but he left messages on your wall and flowers outside your door. Not cut hothouse flowers, but living blooms, vibrant, delicate, fragrant blossoms from which he had carefully plucked every thorn. Tins of tea and your favorite cocoas. Your favorite snacks. Replenishments for your prenatal vitamins. And every day, an_ I love you _on your wall._

_He never missed an appointment or a chance to spend time with the baby. He was waiting in the waiting room when you showed up, and though he gave you your space and never tried to touch you or entangle your fingers as you'd so often done before the job made a liar of him, he paid rapt attention to the exams and scans and sonograms and asked questions. People who think John a fool deserve the label themselves. Behind the smartass is a sharp mind. It's what makes him such a good cop, and part of what won your heart._

_And when you let him, which was far less frequently than he deserved now that you think on it, he came over to read to the baby. He always came bearing a gift for you and a book for the baby, the latter tucked beneath his arm._ Goodnight, Moon _and_ The Monster at the End of This Book, Winnie the Pooh _and_ The Wind in the Willows. _He sat on the couch or cross-legged on the floor and read from the pages, and though you never told him, hardened by pique and pride, his measured voice comforted you. Sometimes you let him sit beside you as he read, and you watched his lips give shape to the pictures on the page. Now and then, his gaze flicked to you, soft and hopeful, or to the round hump of your belly, and the unvarnished yearning in his eyes made yours prickle in helpless sympathy._

_He always left the book as a gift, a paper and cardboard legacy for the child he loves so much. He's trying, doing the best he can to be a good father from across the hall, and he's never forgotten you. The flowers keep coming, as do the chocolates and the vitamins and the scented lotions. A few weeks ago, it was fresh blood oranges. Last week, there was a knock at the door, and when Jake came back, it was with a pint of Chocofudge ice cream and a box of cherry cordials._

Detective Kennex sends his regards, _he said, and you sat in the bed, round as a beach ball, and bawled like a child over cherries and chocolate. In that moment, you wanted him more than anything in the world, wanted to wrap your arms around him and feel his warmth and smell his skin and taste his lips, but your pride insisted that to knock upon his door was to sell yourself too cheaply to a man who had already set you aside once, and so you sent the ice cream to the freezer and the cherries to the refrigerator and told yourself that the terrible emptiness in your heart was for the best._

A door to the left of the stage opens, and the honorees emerge, resplendent in their dress blues. Polished brass and white gloves and caps with stiff, oiled brims. Maldonado is there, smart and crisp, eyes sharp inside her face. Then come two men she does not recognize, one young and one with silver at the temples. Members of the tactical team, she supposes, or undercovers with eyes in the deputy chief's office.

And then there is John, dark-eyed and solemn, and so beautiful that her breath catches. She blinks back tears and curls her fingers around the armrests of her chair.

_I miss you,_ she thinks fiercely, and fights the impulse to reach for him.

He's two steps out the door when he sees her, and his surprise is so complete that he freezes. His eyes widen, awe and exultation, and his lips tremble and curve into a hesitant smile.

_Hey, sweetheart,_ she mouths, and pries her fingers from the armrest to give him an awkward, waggling wave.

A huff escapes him, and he turns his head, and when he looks at her again, his eyes are wet. He opens his mouth as though to speak, but before he can, the police commissioner appears with a sheaf of papers in one white-gloved hand, and John has no choice but to take his place in line, feet wide apart and hands clasped behind his back.

The commissioner strides to the podium and taps the mic to test its functionality, and with a deep breath, a practiced smile, and a flat joke, he launches into his grandiose speech.

She pays him no mind. She has no desire to hear a man who knows nothing of it wax poetic about sacrifice. While John had been going over wiretap records, surveillance footage, and entry plans in some grey bunker with a cot on one wall and a steel toilet bolted to the other, he had been dining at _Les Monts,_ unaware of the corruption that seethed in the office just down the hall, and while she had been hunched over the toilet, vomiting and sobbing at the same time and listening to the soft, deferential voice of the funeral director with two-tone hair inside her head, discussing casket options and tasteful floral arrangements, he'd been screwing his wife on vintage Martha Stewart Collection sheets.

It's John who holds her attention. John, who hasn't taken his eyes off of her, who is still watching her with undisguised wonder, as though she were not a woman with water weight and swollen ankles and fingers, but a goddess from On High, descended from the firmament to bless unworthy mortals.

_He's looked at you like that before. On your wedding day, when you were coming down the aisle on Rudy's arm, veil over your face and baby's breath in your hair. Naked adoration as he knelt before the altar and took your hands in his. His eyes were wet then, too, and shining with happiness and pride as he recited his vows, solemn and not quite steady. His hands, however, were solid as bedrock when the priest wrapped the white silk ribbon around your clasped hands. They didn't waver until he raised your veil and cupped your face in them and whispered your name against your lips._

_On your wedding night, when those same hands undressed you between hungry, open-mouthed kisses and snaked beneath your gown to caress your thighs and pull down your silk panties. He'd loved you a thousand times by then, had claimed you in every room of the apartment and in the back of the cruiser and in a precinct interrogation room with your skirt rucked above your hips and your panties dangling from your ankle, and he still looked at you like it was the first time. His eyes were fire, and his lips were velvet, and you'll never forget the shudder that gripped him when he slid into you and made you his wife in earnest, the heat of his breath on your ear._

Rhea. My Rhea. _Delirious and possessive as his hips began to snap and roll._

_And after everything that's happened, he's still looking at you like you're the only light in the world._

_He loves you, Rhea._

John, walking her dog and cleaning her apartment and hanging up hooks long before they were anything but neighbors and battered soldiers who occasionally shared the same foxhole in the middle of the night. John, sitting with her in the emergency room when she'd come down with a vicious flu and been too stubborn to go on her own, terrified that they'd force her into an overnight stay. John, bunking down on her couch so he could take care of her that night and calling her periodically from the precinct for the next two days to make sure she hadn't toppled off the toilet and cracked her skull on the shower. John, on his knees in front of her chair, telling her she was beautiful before he kissed her for the first time, hard and eager and so filthy good. John, fucking her in her bed, desperate and sweaty and unapologetic as the bedsprings creaked and his ass flexed and undulated. Not love yet, not for him, but sweet nonetheless. John, holding her after it was over and kissing the salt from her skin and telling her that she could touch him whenever she pleased.

John, inviting her to dinner a few nights later and turning up dressed to the nines and with long-stemmed roses in his arms. John, holding her car door and pulling out the chair in which she would not sit and holding her hand by candlelight at a secluded corner table. John, declaring his love as he fucked her against the wall of her apartment, dress pants bunched around his thighs as he pounded into her and his prosthesis bleated about integration failure. John, learning to wheelchair-ballroom dance because it pleased her, and never mind the tittering gibes of Paul and others, who left ballet shoes inside his locker. John, canceling plans at the behest of the job, but doing his best to let her know that she was loved, with flowers delivered to her office and surprise visits thereto with greasy bags of takeout in hand.

John, taking her for a midnight stroll on the Golden Gate Bridge and offering his heart along with a small, velvet box and laughing against her lips as he pulled her acceptance from them with a giddy kiss. John, being called to the job on the first morning of their honeymoon, shamefaced and silent as he packed a bag and caught the first flight to San Francisco to take point on a massive drug raid with a joint task force. John, catching a red-eye eighteen hours later and coming back to lavish her with kisses until she couldn't breathe, _I'm sorry, I love you_ chanted against her lips and her throat and the valley between her breasts as he pulled off her clothes and loved her into a boneless, incoherent stupor. John, spending the next two weeks spoiling her rotten with quiet dinners and sunset walks through Napa Valley, sampling his way through the countless wineries and spending more than he should to indulge her fascination with boutique chocolatiers. John, wrestling her onto a hammock because she wanted the experience of lying with him in one, and taking her cane-pole fishing at a stocked pond, cradling her against his chest while the red-and-white bobbers floated on the murky water and the setting sun turned the bourbon in his tumbler to amber.

John, euphoric and gabbling in an interrogation room when she told him she was pregnant, tongue twisting around all the questions vying to leave his mouth. John, ecstatic and terrified and asking the obstetrician again and again if the pregnancy posed any danger to her, massive hand curled around her small, pale one, and each time, she heard his unspoken fear. _Please don't take my Rhea._ John, ordering Dorian to download every book on pregnancy and special-needs mothers and listening to them in the cruiser for hours on end. John, hunkered in front of his laptop at night and researching specialists and adaptive equipment and prenatal therapies until his eyelids drooped and he threatened to collapse onto his keyboard. John, nested snugly in bed with a carton of cold spicy noodles, snarfing leftovers and watching the ballgame and absently rubbing her stomach with lazy affection.

John, putting her into the car outside Sam's house at two in the morning with trembling arms and driving to the noodle shop in wet-eyed silence and buying half the menu to prove his devotion. John, sitting her on his lap and trying to coax shrimp teriyaki down her unwilling throat, crooning and rocking and swearing his love.

_You are my sunshine, my only sunshine._ An infant flower waving its leafy arms in frenetic glee.

John, bringing her a pint of Chocofudge ice cream in the middle of the night just because, moved by love and tireless devotion.

"-the tireless sacrifice of our brave officers," the commissioner is saying, gloved hands curled around the sides of the podium, and Jesus God, she wishes he would stop pounding that nail.

_Oh, go fuck yourself!_ she wants to scream. _What the fuck would you know about it, you oblivious motherfucker?_ And from her bones wells the memory of waking in the night and groping for John among the sheets and finding nothing but cool moonlight beneath her fingers.

She holds her tongue with an effort that tastes like copper and shifts ponderously in her chair.

"Are you all right?" Dorian whispers from the side of his mouth.

_No, I'm not all right. This is bullshit._ Her belly tightens and her eyes burn. "I'm fine," she says, and rubs her belly to soothe the child inside her.

Onstage, John's eyes narrow.

_Jesus Christ, Rhea, hold your shit together. You didn't come here to make a scene, and if you don't calm down, Jake'll be down here to broadcast his concerns to the whole goddamn auditorium. Get through this, and you can get the hell out of here and have a Number Four Plato Grande at El Alazan, and damn the price you'll pay later._

She takes a deep breath through her nose and holds it until her belly relaxes. _I'm fine,_ she mouths at John, and wipes at her traitorous eyes.

A Kleenex materializes beneath her nose. Dorian, of course, ever prepared. She accepts it with a snort.

The commissioner finishes at long, merciful last, and then the ceremony begins in earnest. Maldonado is the first to receive her medal, and Rhea applauds even as her teeth grind. Sandra Maldonado can shove that medal straight up her lying ass and see if it comes with a _vibrate_ setting. She's the one who visited this darkness upon her house, and no matter her reasons, she will never forgive it, never forget that the woman who had embraced her so warmly at her wedding had sent her husband down the rabbit hole, made a liar of him, and then come to their shattered home to pat her hand and offer useless sympathy.

_Cunt,_ she thinks bitterly, and in her mind's eye, she sees her standing over her in those same dress blues while she sobbed over John's casket.

The unknown officers come next, and their faces shine with pride as the commissioner affixes the medals to their chests. A few seats down, a pair of wives erupt into jubilant applause, and she knows from experience what will happen later tonight in the privacy of their homes. A nice dinner and a bottle of wine and a celebratory fuck in the marriage bed, a reaffirmation of bonds sorely tested by the unforgiving demands of duty. They have known the agony of uncertainty, of waiting by the phone to hear that their men have survived the bust, unscathed, and now they will know the ecstasy of a job well done.

Then it is John's turn, and he steps forward with martial dignity, chest outthrust to afford the commissioner ample space. His face is impassive, but his eyes are alive and fixed on her. _Do you see?_

_I see, sweetheart, and I am so proud, even if I can't say it._ She swallows and chokes back a sob, and then she claps until her hands sting.

The commissioner steps back and shakes John's hand, and then John steps back and gives a crisp salute. 

"Detective Kennex, since you were instrumental to the success of this operation, would you like to say a few words?" the commissioner asks.

She's sure he'll refuse. John has no patience for droning speeches and even less inclination to give them, but to her surprise, he responds with a curt nod and steps to the podium.

"I, uh, I'm not good at this type of thing, so I'll keep it short." He sidles from foot to foot. "Everyone on this stage busted their ass to get this thing done, and they should be proud of what they did. This city is safer because of them, and there's no denying that. But I'm not a hero. I'm just a guy who got up and went to work."

"The real heroes are out there." He nods toward the audience. "The wives and mothers and daughters, the people who got left behind. They pulled a duty just as hard and thankless as the one we chose, and no one gives them the recognition they deserve. Waiting by that phone for news that your cop made it through has got to be one of the hardest things to do, and yet they do it every day, all while working jobs of their own and keeping the house running so we can mop up the sh-filth this city throws at us every day."

"We all made sacrifices for this. Captain Maldonado staked her reputation on being right. Albanez and York suited up and left their families to do the right thing. They kicked in that door, not knowing what was waiting for them on the other side. Me, I uh-shit." He huffs and clutches the sides of the podium, and he turns his head in an effort to collect himself.

"I, uh, became a ruthless, lying son of a bitch to the one I love most in the world," he says, thin and tight. "She was nine weeks pregnant, and I kissed her goodbye and walked out that door and let her think I was dead for eight days. I let her live every wife's worse nightmare, let her pick out caskets and flowers and give me a beautiful eulogy I didn't deserve and cry herself to sleep at night, thinking I was dead, and I let her do it at the most vulnerable time in her life. All my wife ever did was love me, and I reached inside her chest and broke the heart she entrusted to me. I'm not a hero; I'm a monster. I'll never regret doing my duty, but I will always be sorry for the way I had to do it."

"So if you're looking for a hero, don't look up here. Look down there, at those people who never had a choice, who never took an oath to the job and who still have to go without and be disappointed and give up the dreams they love most. They're heroes. I'm just the asshole who did his job."

He gives a brusque nod to the commissioner and retreats on stiff legs, and she's not sure whether to laugh or cry. The commissioner looks like he swallowed a turnip, doubtless caught flat-footed by John's candor, and Maldonado is looking sidelong at John as he resumes his place, her eyes bright with guilt and anguish.

_Shit,_ she thinks, and tears well in her eyes, because she knows John has just laid his own heart bare in front of his peers and superiors, has offered her the sincerest and most intimate apology that he can, more vulnerable than the breathless, panicky ones he'd whispered in the hours, days, and weeks after his miraculous resurrection.

_I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. It's over now. It's over._ It wasn't, not then, but it is now. Now there is only the need to get to John and enfold him, burrow into his solid warmth and breathe him in until he's all she can smell. _John. Oh, my John._

There are closing remarks from the commissioner, but she scarcely hears them. There is only John, still and beautiful and waiting for the end, hands clasped behind his back and tears glistening in his eyelashes.

_Oh, shut up, you obnoxious blowhard,_ she thinks as the closing speech winds on, and the baby kicks in vigorous agreement.

It's another five minutes before the ceremony draws to an official close, and then the honorees must wend their way through well-wishers and grasping hands and the blinding supernova of flashbulbs. The other wives, ambulatory and svelte, push through the crowd to their husbands, but she low and bulbous, can only sit and wait for an opportunity while people swirl and swish around her. She watches John shake hands with the beaming brass and exchange hugs with Maldonado and handshakes with Alvarez and York. He catches her eye and starts toward her, but his progress is impeded by an eager cameraman who steps in front of her and crouches for his shot.

"Hang on, Detective," he cajoles, camera poised in front of his face.

"Get your ass out of my wife's face," he replies, and steps around him.

The cameraman spins. "Oh, hey, a picture with your wife?"

John ignores him and drops to his haunches in front of her chair. "Hey," he says, and swallows thickly.

"Hey, handsome," she says, and reaches out to stroke his cheek.

He turns his head to nuzzle her palm, and his eyes close at her touch. A searing flash erupts from beside them. The photographer has gotten his shot after all.

_I hope your SD card melts,_ she thinks mutinously. "Dorian, can I get a little help?"

Dorian is only too happy to oblige. He rises from his chair and steps into the aisle. "Let's go," he orders, and seizes the photographer by the elbow.

"Hey, I'm not done," the man protests.

"Yes, you are," Dorian answers implacably, and steers him away.

"Congratulations," she murmurs when they're out of earshot. 

John shakes his head.

_Oh, honey._ She draws her fingers over the butt of his jaw. "I was wondering if you had any plans," she says hesitantly. "I know you might have to go back to work or have plans with Sam, but if you've got the time, I thought maybe we could spend the day together."

He opens his eyes, and the hope she sees there makes her heart ache. "Yeah, sure. Whatever you want, wherever. I've got the rest of the day. You want lunch? We could go for noodles."

She giggles. "Always with the noodles."

"It doesn't have to be. We can go wherever you want."

_I want you._ "Come home, John. Just...come home. I miss you."

"Rhea..." His mouth works, and then he surges forward to kiss her, breath warm and plosive against her lips.

"My John," she murmurs softly, and opens to him. He tastes of toothpaste and coffee, and the tentative flicker of his tongue against hers makes her shiver. "Mmm," she purrs, and cards her fingers through his hair. "We're in public, you know," she says.

"Ask me if I care. Besides, based on the state of your stomach, I'm pretty sure people know we've got something going."

"True," she concedes, and chuckles.

"How is my girl, anyway?" he asks, and rests his hand on the hard, high hump of her belly.

As if in answer, the baby gives a vigorous thump and wriggles inside her. "Oh! Does that answer your question?"

He smiles, sunny and besotted, and rests his head on her abdomen, mouth pressed to the fabric of her dress. "Hey there," he says fondly. "Hey there, baby girl." He caresses her belly with reverent fingers. The baby flexes and spins.

"Maybe when we get home later, you can help me think of names." She draws her finger over his nape. "She'll be here sooner than we think."

"God," he breathes. "Me with a baby. I can't even cook ramen, and according to Dorian, I'm a disaster with kids."

"Well, Dorian has been known to lie," she says drily.

"Rhea..."

"He was just doing his job, I know," she says softly. "Doesn't mean I'm ready to like it. Besides, little Victor would say he was wrong about that."

"Yeah, well, there's a class of traumatized school kids that says he's not. Besides, I think the bribe of the giraffe helped."

"Bribes usually do," she agreed. "If it helps, I thought the field-trip barf incident was hilarious. I'm sure most of the little turds could've used a wake-up call."

He snorts. "You realize that someday, someone is going to call our girl a little turd."

She shrugs. "So what? She probably will be. All kids are little turds at some point. She'll be our little turd."

"You hopeless romantic, you," he says and huffs in amusement.

"It's why you love me."

He looks up at her, chin resting on her belly. "I do love you, so much."

"So you still want to spend the day with me, I take it?" she says nonchalantly.

"Are you kidding me? I never wanted-" He stops and swallows with a click.

"Hey," she soothes. "Hey. No more of that. Let's get out of here. We've got places to be."

He nods and clears his throat, and then he rises from his knees with the creak and pop of his joints. "Where to first?"

"The bathroom. Your girl is a bit of a dancer. I mean, if you'd rather, I can have Jake help me and meet you out front."

"Jake, nothing," he mutters. "That bag of bolts can stay right where it is." He brushes off his knees and rounds her chair to grasp her push handles.

"Bag of bolts, huh? He's just doing his job."

He grunts and rolls her toward the exit. "The only bot I want touching my wife and child is Dorian. The minute you're on your feet again, that thing is out the door."

"We'll see if you're so resolute when it's three in the morning and you're up for the third time that night, helping me breastfeed and changing poopy diapers."

"It's gone," he insists. "I don't want any confusion as to who her daddy is."

"Trust me, love, that is something no one will ever doubt. Dollars to doughnuts, she'll be a Daddy's girl." She pats her stomach. 

Jake is waiting by the exit. "Mrs. Kennex, do you require assistance?" he asks.

"No," John grunts. "I've got her. Take the day, go for a stroll in the linen closet."

"John," she chides gently. To Jake, she says, "It's fine, Jake. I'm going to spend the rest of the day with my husband. Why don't you take the car and go home?"

"Yes, Mrs. Kennex. Contact me immediately if you require assistance."

"Sure thing," John mutters darkly, and she resists the impulse to reach back and deliver a blind swat to his hand.

"Thanks, Jake," she calls as John rolls her out the doors and into the marbled corridor.

"Don't know why you waste the niceties on that thing," he grumbles as he pushes her to the restroom. "It's like exchanging pleasantries with the toaster."

"Why not? What harm does it do? And there are plenty of people who say the same thing about Dorian," she counters.

"And they're wrong. Dorian's...Dorian. He's my partner. And he's saved my life half a dozen times."

She sees no reason to argue the point, so she falls silent and lets him wheel her into the beige-tiled bathroom. He takes an exploratory peek into the accessible stall to make sure it hasn't been used as a canvas by a shit-wielding Picasso or as a training session for a toddler who has vastly overestimated their proficiency in taking a piss, and when he's satisfied of its relative cleanliness, he steps back and rolls her inside.

She wrinkles her nose at the odor of bleached ass.

"How do you want to do this?" he asks. "Do I just pick you up?"

She sets her brakes and swings out her footplates. "We're just going to dance. Help me stand?"

He bends at the waist and knees, and when she has a firm grip on his shoulders, he slowly straightens.

And just like that, she's in his arms again. She smells him, soap and wool and Aqua Velva and John, and she closes her eyes and slips her arms around his neck. "My John. I've missed you so much." She rests her head on his chest.

"Christ, Rhea, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." White-gloved hands in her hair, and his heart is muffled thunder inside his chest.

"Sssshhhh. That's the last apology you owe me for this, sweetheart. No more. It's done." She caresses his nape.

"But-" He's trembling in her embrace.

"No buts. It was a fucking painful, ugly mess, and I hated every goddamn minute of it, but I miss you, and I'm tired of being mad. I can't forget it-" Her chest clenches at the memory of an empty bed and a neatly-folded flag. "-but I don't want to dwell on it, and I don't want to talk about it. I just want-you."

"All right," he says thickly. "I can do that." He caresses the cup of her skull, and then he slips his arm around her waist and sweeps her into a bruising kiss that's all teeth and tongue and possessive adoration. His hand splays on the swell of her ass, and his breath comes through his nose in a warm, plosive rush.

"Mmm," she purrs into his mouth and cards her fingers through the fine hairs at his nape. "This is not the sexiest place to be doing this."

"Don't care," he mumbles, and nips her bottom lip.

"I don't either," she agrees. "But I really have to pee."

"Sorry." He breaks the kiss and sidles in a slow, waddling circle until she's over the toilet, and then he raises her dress. "I've got you if you need to get your underwear."

She fumbles beneath her distended belly for the elastic of her waistband and laboriously pulls her panties down. "Ease me down?"

He lowers her to the seat with meticulous care, and she sighs with relief as her bladder surrenders to nature's implacable demand. "Thank God."

"Never been called that," he says smugly.

"Oh, shut it. And yes, you have. Roughly every time you took me to bed."

"Oh, yeah." He grins.

She laughs and reaches for the toilet paper. "Jackass," she mutters.

"But you love me," he says quietly.

"I do," she answers, and cleans herself. When she's finished, she holds out her arms.

He lifts her with the unwavering assurance of love and steadies her while she arranges herself to her satisfaction, and then he shuffles her back to her chair. "Where to?" he asks once she's safely settled.

"I was thinking El Alazan."

He winces. "Mexican? You'll pay for it later."

_Buddy, I won't be the only one,_ she thinks, but her only reply is, "Probably, but I have a craving."

"Then Mexican it is." He gives her a jaunty salute and reverses course out of the stall.

A trip to the sink later, and they're stepping into the warm summer sunlight. She tilts her face heavenward to savor it, and John bends to kiss her upturned lips, slow and lingering and worshipful.

_He loves you, Rhea,_ Dorian says, and in her mind's eye, she sees John stumbling through the first awkward weeks of wheelchair-ballroom dancing and enduring the gibes of his colleagues so that he could dance so beautifully at their wedding.

The dance is beginning again, slow and sweet, and this time, they will get it right.


	3. Homecoming

Dreaming. He has to be dreaming. Three hours ago, he'd been looking forward to carrying his worthless bit of gold back to his cold, lifeless apartment and crawling into a bottle of Beam until he emerged from the other side with a hangover and a throbbing bladder, and now he's taking Rhea to lunch. Rhea, who is pregnant and happy and radiant.

 _You never expected to see her there,_ his heart whispers as he pushes to the crosswalk. _Not then, not ever again. You'd extended the invitation every day for a month and gotten nothing but cool, stony silence. You knew a no even when you didn't hear it, so when you stepped onto that stage and saw her sitting beside Dorian, your heart leaped into your throat and you thought you might pass out, just crumple to the floor like a decommissioned MX. You bit the inside of your cheek to bring the world back into focus, sure that she would dissolve, a figment of your wistful imagination, but she was still there, vivid in her rich green dress and impossibly solid, especially her protuberant belly._

_Dorian was such a smug little toaster, the bastard, a cat with a mouthful of cream, and you wondered if he'd had something to do with it, had colluded with her to spring this surprise on you, but you knew better. You might've earned the brunt of her disappointed fury, but Dorian's duplicity had been neither forgotten nor excused. There had been no mercy in her heart for him in the three strained weeks you spent in her company after you came crawling home, only bitter, flinty contempt. When she spoke of him, which was seldom and grudging, she called him a bucket of bolts and malfunctioning circuits, and nothing you could say would assuage her pique. She had been twice-betrayed by him, and her forgiveness was long and irredeemably spent. No, Dorian had had no part in this miracle. She had come of her own accord, moved by an impulse you could not fathom._

_You racked your brain while the commissioner droned on and sweat prickled in your armpits. You hoped it was loved that moved her, love and patience and the sweetness you so loved, but the forlorn voice of experience assured you that it was nothing so kind. You had already been granted more than one reprieve for your thoughtless blunders; your father had pulled you from the frigid, throttling waters of Lake Mitchell and snatched you from eternity's jaws, and twenty-eight years later, heat had saved you from bleeding to death in the dust-choked rubble of your pitiful ignorance while your severed leg twitched on the asphalt. It was too much to hope that the universe would be so merciful a third time to a soul undeserving. Best to leave such tender mercies to the families of the eleven men who had followed you into that raid and paid with their lives._

_So you savored every glimpse of her, sure that it would be the last, that she had come to sever the ties between you for good. Maybe there were divorce papers waiting for you on your com(and wouldn't that be a sad record to have, a marriage down the toilet in less than a year? Just another fuck-up from the perennial disaster that was John Kennex.), or maybe she had come to deliver the kiss-off in spectacular public fashion, to spit in the face of your professional pride as you'd insulted the honor she had offered you when she took your hand at the altar and entrusted you with her heart._

_You were terrified of what you might find when you looked into her face, or what you wouldn't, but there was no anger, no seething bitterness. She was tired, fatigue smudged beneath her eyes like soot, but she was also heavily pregnant, and when you met her gaze, you could swear you saw a glimmer of pride, faint but unmistakable._

Please, _you thought, and squeezed your encircled wrist so hard it hurt._ Please be there when I'm done.

 _You were sure the goddamned commissioner had blown it when he began to flog that tried-and-true canard of sacrifice, caressing its well-worn sanctity like the flesh of a cherished lover's thigh. Her jaw twitched ominously and her hands curled into fists on her knees and her eyes filled with tears, and in the back of the room, you saw your blank-faced stand-in begin to sidle._

Shut the fuck up, _you wanted to snarl._ Shut the fuck up! You don't know what you're talking about, and if you keep running your ignorant mouth she'll leave and I'll never get her back. _But you kept your mouth shut and stood there on trembling knee, praying she wouldn't release her brakes and wash her hands of your sorry ass forever._

_Bless her soul, but she didn't. She held her ground, one hand rubbing her belly as though to soothe the child she carried, stiff-necked as she'd been when she'd told Anna Moore to kiss her ass._

Before he was anything else, he was my friend, and I will give you nothing. 

_She was still there when he was finished, and still looking at you with what you could swear was pride. You expected her to look away when your name was called, to turn her head and stare at the wall and chew the inside of her cheek as she had done so often when she was trying to contain her anger and disappointment at the man you had chosen to be, but she held your gaze, and she didn't drop it when the commissioner stepped forward to pin that worthless medal on your chest. You knew the last thing she wanted was to see you get rewarded for shattering the heart she'd offered you, but damn if her lips didn't twitch into a fleeting smile, and when the commissioner stepped back and shook your hand, she was the first to applaud, long and loud._

_You couldn't believe it was real. You couldn't feel your feet as you descended the steps after the ceremony, and as you approached, you waited for her to disappear, dissolve in the dim glow cast by the gold on your chest, but she never did. She held as steady as her gaze, and when you dropped to your haunches in front of her, she cupped your cheek and uttered the words you had thought to hear only in your most bittersweet dreams._

Come home, John. Just come home.

He's still not sure it's real as he pushes her across the street to the parking garage. Part of him is convinced that this is just another dream, that the instant he lifts her from her chair to put her into the car, she'll dissolve like mist in the rain and he'll wake up in his airless apartment with a lump in his throat and a tacky wetness inside his boxers.

 _My Rhea, my Rhea, my Rhea,_ he thinks feverishly, and his gloved hands tremble and sweat as he rolls her up the opposite curb cut and up the ramp into the parking garage. _Please be real. Please don't go._

"Ugh," she says from in front of him. "I don't think the baby appreciates the smell of gasoline and motor oil." She presses an index finger to her nose.

"I'm going, I'm going," he assures her and picks up his pace. "Are you going to be sick?"

She shakes her head, but it's uncertain, and he's almost at a trot by the time they reach the car. "Hang on, hang on," he exhorts her, and opens the passenger door as she sets her brakes. He swings aside her footplates and scoops her into his arms.

 _Now,_ he thinks with dismal certainty. _Now is when she'll disappear and I'll wake up with a broken heart and boxers full of jizz._ But she remains solid and heavy in his arms, and the relief is so sweet, he's afraid his knees will unhinge and send them both sprawling to the stained, gritty pavement.

"I got you, I got you," he babbles stupidly, and slides her into the passenger seat. Then, "Uh. Shit."

"What?" she asks blankly.

"I don't have any padding for your seatbelt." He swears and wishes her medbot were still around so he could pilfer the one from her car, but when he scans the garage, there is no sign of either it or her red sedan. "Shit."

"Don't worry about it."

"I don't want you to be uncomfortable," he insists. _Or to get hurt on my watch. That damn thing would never let me hear the end of it, the smug bastard._

 _He is incapable of smugness, John,_ Dorian says inside his head with long-suffering patience.

_Officious, then._

_He can't be officious, either,_ comes the weary reply.

 _Whatever,_ he retorts mutinously.

"I'll be fine," she says placidly, equally as stubborn, and his love for her is a hot throb inside his chest, a banked ember flared to euphoric, renewed life.

"I just want you-"

"I can't say the same for the your upholstery if we don't go," she says thickly, and her eyes water with impending nausea.

The threat to his squad car's interior galvanizes him, and he fastens her seatbelt, shuts her door, and hurries to the driver's side, where he slides inside and slams the door. He immediately turns on the air conditioner and activates its filtration system.

"You okay?" He reaches out to stroke her nape.

She nods. "Just hypersensitive to smells. Last week, it was too much Parmesan cheese." She manages a feeble grin. "Don't drive off without my chair."

"I won't. You be all right until I get back?"

"Uh huh."

"I'll be back in just a minute." He squeezes her shoulder and gets out of the car to collect her abandoned chair. The first time he'd tried to store it, it had taken him five minutes and a stream of bilious invective, but now it's a matter of thirty seconds. He moves with the precision of muscle memory, detaching footplates and removing cushions and collapsing seats. The clattering, whispering rhythm of life with Rhea.

 _I'm going home,_ he thinks, dazed, and lifts the folded chair into the trunk. It's a motion he has performed dozens of times, hundreds, but today, there is something of the sacramental in it, a reverent genuflection behind the trunk of his car.

 _Like carrying her over the threshold,_ his long-departed father muses, and the phantom heft of Rhea settles into his arms.

 _Welcome home, Mrs. Kennex,_ he says, jubilant and proud inside his head, and Rhea's lips are soft and sweet.

He closes the trunk and tosses the footplates and cushions into the backseat, and then he hurries back to the driver's seat. "You all right? It better in here?" he frets as he slides into position behind the wheel. "I'll have you out of here in just a second." He reaches for the gearshift.

"John," she says softly, and covers his hand with hers, and his heart begins to triphammer inside his chest.

 _It was a mistake,_ he thinks wildly. _It was a mistake to invite me home, and now she's going to take it back._

"Yeah?" His mouth is dry, and his fingers curl around hers. He's afraid to look at her, afraid of what he will see. The disappointment, the disgust, the hurt, bottomless and vast, stretching from skin to marrow and welling in her eyes like unshed tears.

Lips skim his cheek, and eyelashes flutter against his temple. "John, my John," she croons, and her hand cups his opposite cheek.

"Rhea, I-" Oh God, he _needs_ her.

"Ssssh, ssh," she breathes against his jaw. "I told you, no more apologies."

 _But I owe them,_ he thinks. _I owe them, and in my experience, unpaid debts have a way of coming back to bite you in the ass._

He turns blindly into her kiss. "Rhea, I'm-I want to be your husband again. Please, please." He caresses her rounded cheeks.

"Sweetheart, you are. You always were," she murmurs. "It's all right. Oh, my love."

"Rhea, Rhea, Rhea." Fingers in her hairs and his mouth on hers. "I want to come home."

"You are, honey, I promise," she soothes. "But first, you're taking me to lunch."

"Lunch, yeah," he agrees, and rests his forehead against hers. "Lunch."

"Large nachos and a Number Four Plato Grande, as I recall. And if you don't mind taking me to the bathroom two or three times, we could go to the farmer's market, stock up on food."

"Make a day of it, huh?" He'd blow out every disk in his back if it meant the chance to be with her, to hold her hand and stroke her hair and be the man she loves again.

"Mmm." A lazy kiss. "I'm interested in so much more than just your pretty face."

"Yeah?"

"I've missed you. Missed your stories and your grumbling and the way you scratch your ass while you shuffle through the apartment."

"I do not grumble," he grumbles, and she laughs. It's the best sound in the world. "And I don't scratch my ass. Not all the time, anyway."

"Of course not," she says solemnly.

He eyes her. "Smartass," he mutters, but he's euphoric, and he jitters his feet in the footwell and resists the urge to squirm in his seat.

"And you married me."

"Best decision I ever made," he says, and his eyes burn.

She raises his hand and kisses gloved knuckles. "Feed me, sweetheart."

"Absolutely. Yes." He rubs his hands together and seizes the wheel, and then he pulls out of the parking space. "Uh, do you mind if I make a pit stop at the station to change?"

"John, I'm starving."

"I know, I know, but this wool is really hot, and it's not really casual-dining attire."

She growls in frustration.

"Okay, never mind. I'll be fine." He raises his hands in surrender.

"Make it quick."

"Like the Flash, I swear." He leans over to give her a quick, placatory peck on the lips.

She gives him a decidedly skeptical huff.

But for once, he is as good as his word, and six minutes after he runs into the precinct locker room, he's back in the car, sporting her favorite cologne and dressed in jeans and a white button-down.

"Hey, handsome." She wolf whistles at him.

"Told you," he says smugly.

Another huff, this one indulgent, and she threads her fingers with his.

 

She's still holding his hand two hours later at a corner table at El Alazan. She's demolished the Number Four and put a serious hurt on her order of nachos, and she's casting an avaricious, predatory eye toward the remains of his beef fajitas.

"How can you possibly want more?" he groans, and dabs at his greasy mouth with a napkin. His belly is so much contented lead beneath his clothes, and the mere thought of another bite inspires a dull nausea.

"Building a human is a hard business," she answers serenely, and pats the taut dome of her belly.

"Can't argue with you there." He makes a mental note to stop for some Pepto and peppermint tea on the way home to help with her inevitable indigestion. "You still want to hit the farmer's market?"

"I do. I want to pick up some fruit, maybe the ingredients for a cream sauce. I thought I'd make the tilapia on a bed of angel hair dish that you like for dinner tomorrow."

"You don't have to get all crazy. I don't want you stressing yourself. "I'll be fine with noodles and sandwiches."

"John Kennex, you are a father-to-be. I refuse to let you subsist on ramen you mixed in a cup between your thighs and day-old tuna melts. You're going to need all the energy you can get soon. Besides, cooking for my husband is not 'getting crazy.' It's daily life. And anyway, Jake won't let me overdo it. One twinge or spike in my vitals, and he'll haul my ass to bed."

"At least the damn thing is good for something," he mutters.

She reaches for her glass of lemon tea. "Not a bad conversationalist, either."

"It's a damn talking toaster," he reminds her. "How good can it be?"

She shrugs. "He doesn't care if I talk while I'm on the toilet."

"Truly the height of wit."

She snorts. "Says the man who once spent many a night wooing me with his head in the toilet."

"Is that what I was doing? Funny; I thought I was having panic attacks."

"Panic, courtship. It worked." She sips her tea.

He eyes her swollen stomach with pride. "Yes, it did." He preens.

"So humble," she mutters, but her eyes are dancing with amusement, and fond pride nestles in the corner of her mouth, and God help him, he could cry with the utter, sublime relief of it.

"You want to split a xango with me?"

John only groans.

 

An hour and a half and two trips to the bathroom later, they're at the park, seated on a bench beneath a tree that rings the farmer's market. He's heaved Rhea out of her chair and settled her beside him, and she is a pleasant heaviness at his side. A bag of fruit sits at her feet, plums, pears, and nectarines.

"You okay? Not too hot?"

"I'm fine, baby," she says dozily. Her voice drifts from the crook of his neck. "I'm perfect." She burrows as close as her bulk will allow.

He turns and nuzzles her cheek and rests his hand on her belly. His daughter kicks beneath his palm. Ten weeks, give or take, and she'll be nestled in the crook of his arm.

"Penny for your thoughts?" Rhea's breath, soft on his neck.

He huffs. "I don't know. It's just- I can't believe this is happening." He strokes her belly.

"Well, you'd better. There's tons to do before she gets here."

"Did you have a baby shower?"

"A few friends from work had a little get-together a few weeks back. I got some receiving blankets and a baby sling and a few hundred diapers which they assure me will last about a week. A breast pump, too, but I'm not sure I'll use it." She shifts her head. "Remind me to finish up the thank-you notes for that, by the by. I don't do it soon, I never will."

He kisses the side of her head. "I could have Dorian do it."

She snorts. "I'm not having Dorian forge my thank-you notes. He's not a steno bot."

"He's not above forgery, either. He set up that dating profile for me. 'Capricorn who loves danger.'"

"Pain in the ass who hogs the bed."

"Do not," he protests. "I'm just trying to protect my wife." It's spoken in jest, but there's no lie to it. He's seen too much, offered too many worthless condolences to too many broken hearts. He won't lose her, too. He can't. She is the only sweetness left in his world, and he won't let her be swept away by some monster in the night.

 _Nope. You'll just push her out yourself,_ whispers his conscience, and in his mind's eye, he sees Richard's face, accusatory and disgusted, as he'd led her out of Maldonado's office.

_What the fuck is the matter with you, Kennex?_

The fajitas roll uneasily in his belly. "You picked up any of the big stuff? Cribs? Bassinets? Changing tables?"

"Big stuff? I've barely started on the little stuff. I thought it was something we should do together."

"I figured Jake would have everything ready by now." He's ashamed of the bitter petulance in his voice.

"Jake isn't her daddy, sweetheart. You've missed so much. I didn't want you to miss this, too."

His throat constricts, and his eyes burn, and he swallows and studies a woman bent over a bin of corn still in the husk. "I, uh, I didn't mean-" He blinks against the blur of tears.

"John, what have I told you about apologies?"

"I know, but-"

She shakes her head. "No buts, baby. What's done is done."

He squeezes her hand until the knuckles whiten. Another swallow. "So, what did you have in mind?"

She idly cards her fingernails through the short, sleek hairs above his ear. "We could go shopping for baby clothes--onesies, booties, bibs, hats, bows, little christening gowns."

"Yeah, okay. I can do that. Whenever you want." Visions of tiny, yellow booties dance in his head, and he imagines taking his daughter for an afternoon stroll with the sun at his back and her a snug, soft weight against his chest.

"More like whenever you can steal a day off," Rhea amends pragmatically.

"Like hell. This is my daughter we're talking about. I'll take personal time if I have to."

"Thought you wanted to save that for after she was born, pair it up with that pittance of a paternity leave?"

"I do. But I want in on this, too. I'll put in for FMLE time if I have to."

"They'll think you've gone soft."

"Fuck 'em. All that matters to me is what you think." He presses a blind kiss to the point of her jaw. "And this little one," he adds quietly, and draws his fingertips over the fabric of her maternity dress.

"We'll work it out. My maternity leave starts in two weeks. I'll have nothing but time then. Maybe you can work it out with Maldonado or swap shifts with someone. In the meantime, there's plenty of stuff to do at home. You can help me decide how to decorate and set up the nursery for maximum accessibility. I'm going to need both hands and absolute stability for the baby, so I'm going to be spending a lot of time in the chair."

 _She hardly seems thrilled with the prospect,_ he thinks.

 _Well, I doubt you'd be all sunshine and roses if someone told you that you were going to spend the next eight months sitting on your ass,_ notes the sardonic voice of Marty Pelham, and grief grips his heart in a pitiless fist. _Christ, John, remember how bugshit you went lying in that bed for a week, too stiff-necked to accept the prosthesis and too fucking proud to take the chair? Shit, you wanted to gnaw your hand off at the goddamned wrist just to have something to do, something to focus on besides the numbness of your ass as it sank more deeply into the bed. After two weeks, you were constructing elaborate plans to throw yourself over the bedrail and drag yourself out of that godforsaken room on your elbows. You might've hated that hunk of titanium and carbon fiber on the end of your stump, been so ashamed of it that your stomach cramped and your balls drew up high and tight against your belly, but you've never been more relieved than when it let you get out of that bed and feel the floor beneath your foot. It was sweet freedom, albeit bought at a shameful price, and after the doctors and therapists and their gawking coterie of med students left, you clumped around and around that stale room in a drunken circle until your wasted muscles gave out and unceremoniously dumped you onto the floor, where you sprawled with your skinny, pasty ass in the air and that damn monstrosity bleated about synthetic integration failure._

_As far as you know, she's been tied to that chair of hers for months, ever since the second trimester, when the obstetrician said her routine transfers ran the risk of an amniotic tear or placental abruption. That's four months of being carried to the john every time she has to take a leak and being placed into the shower like a helpless infant. She's spent her whole life busting her ass to get to where she is, to be physically independent in a world full of obstacles, and now she's reduced to being a medbot's burden. Her world gets smaller every day, and it's not going to get better anytime soon. Muscles she worked for years to get into shape are atrophying a little more every day. By the time she gets to start therapy, she'll be starting at zero and clawing her way up, and God knows if she'll ever get back to where she was before you had the dumb Kennex luck to hit the target._

_Dammit, Marty, you should be here for this,_ he thinks. He remembers when Maria was pregnant with Marty Jr., how happy he'd been, how giddy with anticipation. Near the end, when Maria had been big as a house and Marty's com was always on, he'd talked of nothing but, had chattered for hours about names and potential godparents and future Little League games with Uncle John in the bleachers.

 _Just wait, Kennex,_ he'd said one day when John had grumbled about his happy obsession. _You're gonna get yourself one of these someday. Somebody's gonna fall for that pretty face, and you're gonna set up house and charm your way into her pants, and you're gonna have a yard full of rugrats._

_I don't think so, man. Not too many women are in the market for a workaholic cop._

A snort from Marty. _You've had plenty of interest. You've just been too oblivious to notice._

_Hey, I'm in no hurry to settle down with some clingy nutjob with some crazy, codependent family who expects me to be a one-man private security firm and then looks down on me when I can't provide her with the lifestyle to which they think she's accustomed._

_Such a pessimist, Kennex. With an attitude like that, you'll never get married._

_That's the idea,_ he'd muttered. _Besides, that's what I've got you for._ He'd clapped him on the shoulder.

Two weeks later, Marty's com had announced the imminent arrival of Pelham 2.0, and until the day Marty had been vaporized by Anna's vicious incendiary bomb, John had been glad to be the honorary uncle, the awkward third man in countless family photos.

And now it turns out that Marty was right; he had found a woman crazy enough to take him on, and she was about to give him the family he'd never thought he'd have. He should be here, listening to him rattle endlessly on about cribs and diapers and labor plans and nursery wallpapers. He should be in the driver's seat of the cruiser, hands draped over the steering wheel and mouth stretched in a knowing grin at all the things John was sure she would never do and all the assholes she would date over his dead body. He should be the one at his shoulder when his com goes off and trumpets the arrival of his princess, the one who drives him to the hospital because his heart is in his throat and his hands have lost their customary steadiness. 

_If he were here, none of this would be happening,_ his father says gently, and damn if he doesn't feel his hand on his shoulder and smell his aftershave on the summer breeze. _If he were here, odds are that you'd still have your leg, too. You never would've had to slow down, never would've had to let somebody see past all your bluster and swagger. You'd still be out there, running ninety miles an hour with no OFF switch, and Rhea would still be nothing but a flicker on the periphery of your vision, the quiet neighbor across the hall you never saw. You never would've entered her orbit or held her hand or kissed her lips or confessed your dreams while you were hip to hip in her bed and falling in love a little more with every roll of your hips. No love, no marriage, no little princess in a baby carriage._

Maybe so, but that doesn't change the fact that he wants him there, wants him pacing the hall outside the delivery room and standing on the edge of all those early family photos, the ones in which their eyes are ringed with exhaustion but their smiles are as bright and wide as the Golden Gate Bridge. That he won't be is a cruelty for which he will never forgive Anna and a failure for which he will never forgive himself.

"The baby furniture is going to be the hardest part," Rhea says, interrupting his bleak thoughts. "I've done a bit of window-shopping when I've had the time and energy, and most of the stuff is either too high or too low. I can't get her into or out the cribs. Back in the old days, they used to have a kind called a drop-side crib, where you could lower the side and reach in from there."

"Sounds like something you could use."

"It would be, if they hadn't been recalled them at the turn of the century. Apparently, some little munchkins got their fingers lopped off when the side dropped unexpectedly."

"Well, shit."

"That about sums it up, yes."

"Maybe they still have a few bumping around the antique and curio shops. Nineties kitsch is all the rage."

"Nineties kitsch?" she repeats dubiously.

"What? I watched a lot of late-night TV while you were gone." He shifts on the bench. "Couldn't sleep."

She kisses his shoulder. "Anyway, did you miss the part where they lopped off tiny fingers?"

"No, but maybe I could fix it up, modify it."

"You? You haven't used a screwdriver for anything but prying the cap off your beer."

"Hey, I'm perfectly handy. Ask Dorian. I fixed him that one time."

"You cut the wrong wire and fixed it with old chewing gum."

"They were all purple," he protests. "And I fixed him, didn't I?"

"He sang nothing but Korean pop songs until Rudy jiggered his insides."

"See, now you're just splitting hairs. He worked well enough to do his job. And anyway, a crib and an android are two very different things. I can put together a crib. I'm a guy. It's in my DNA."

She laughs until she snorts. "Oh, God, I've missed this." She wriggles and worms her arms around him.

_Then why did it take you so long to come back to me?_

_It doesn't matter, son. It only matters that she did._

"The OBGYN connected me with the Center for Independent Living, and their liaison gave me a few catalogues of adaptive equipment, but most of it's stuff like shower aids and bedside toilets."

"Helpful."

"Yeah, well, they're a holdover from the bygone days when congenital cripples roamed the earth. These days, they mostly deal with amputees and severe brain injuries and old people who can't afford a bot to wipe their asses for them. There's not a huge market for pregnant cripples."

"We'll figure it out. Maybe Rudy can rig something up."

She lets her head loll against the unforgiving edge of the bench for a moment. "Rudy? You give him that mission, and the crib will carry the baby and the stroller will be self-propelled."

"Probably," he agrees. Then, "That sounds kind of cool, actually."

"Of course it does." She swats him on the shoulder, but there's no heat to it.

"We'll make this work, you know," he murmurs. His daughter spins dreamily beneath his hand. "If I have to enroll in a high-school shop class to figure this out, I will. I'm sure Dorian has schematics for everything under the sun. If that doesn't work, I'll move you to Europe."

"Oh, that I'd pay to see. John Kennex in a thong."

"I bet you would." He waggles his eyebrows.

"Oh, please. I've seen it all." She draws her fingernails over the side of his neck. "And you're being awfully dramatic today. I doubt we'll have to pull up stakes and move to Europe. We'll just need a little ingenuity."

"Well, you're in luck, 'cause I've got that coming out of my ears."

"You've got something coming out of your ears, all right," she mutters.

His brow furrows in wounded indignation. "Hey!"

She laughs, eyes heavy-lidded. "Shut up and kiss me, Detective Kennex." She reaches up to cup his face.

"Happy wife, happy life," he says softly.

 _Ain't that the truth?_ Marty says inside his head, and in his mind's eye, he sees his dark eyes in the cruiser's side mirror, laughing and mischievous.

He kisses his wife and wonders if she tastes salt on his lips.

 

"You don't touch her," are the first words that pass his lips upon his homecoming. Jake the medbot hovers in the doorway and blinks at him with those dead, unsettling eyes. His synthetic eyelashes are white as eiderdown and fine as spidersilk. They should be beautiful, but their meticulous, perfect artifice makes his skin crawl.

"I am perfectly capable of carrying Mrs. Kennex. I have been doing so several times a day for the past one hundred and nineteen days," Jake informs him with blank sunniness.

"Yeah, well, you won't be now," he snarls as he wheels Rhea past him. _You shouldn't have been then, either. It should've been me._

"My strength far exceeds your own, and your synthetic leg makes your balance unpredictable. Therefore, it is in the best interest of the fetus that I-"

"The child. My child," he snaps. "And if you don't shut the fuck up, I'm going to empty my clip into your fucking face."

"John," she soothes. To Jake, she says, "Why don't you take the bags and put the groceries away?"

"It would be more advisable if I were to-"

"John carried me across the threshold as a newlywed, Jake. He can carry me now."

"But-"

"But nothing. Go on now. I'll call if I need you."

Jake blinks at them a moment, circuits processing the order, and then he steps into the corridor and retrieves the small clutch of bags beside the door.

"Goddamn busybody," John grumbles as Jake heads to the kitchen with his culinary cargo.

"He has a system," she says. "It'll take him a few minutes to arrange everything just so."

"A persnickety android. Fabulous."

"Hey, you've got your quirks, Mr. Wears the Same Lucky Socks Every Time the Bears Play on TV."

"I'm supposed to have quirks, I'm a human," he mutters. "And it's not a quirk," he adds defensively. "It's a-"

"System?" she finishes for him.

He lapses into a desultory silence. He rolls her into the bathroom and sets her brakes, and then he steps to the front of her chair to swing out her footplates. "It works," he says as he lifts her to her feet.

"They haven't won a title in twenty years."

"It's not perfect." He lifts her feet from the floor and spins her around so the backs of her knees brush the toilet.

"Obviously."

He lifts her skirt and fumbles with her underwear, and when the latter is lowered, he eases her onto the bowl. 

"It's okay, John," she says as he fumes at the clatter of Jake trundling around the kitchen. "He's just doing his job."

"Not for much longer. Soon as my princess is here, that thing is out on its ass."

"I may need him for longer than that. The birth could be rough on me with my spasticity, and even if it's easy as a breeze, I'm bound to be weak and out of shape and clueless about handling a tiny baby."

"I'll be here with you," he insists.

"Not for long enough," she counters. "Between paternity leave and personal time, you might get a month."

"I told you that I applied for FMLE time."

"There's no guarantee you'll get it, and you can't afford to take three months' leave."

"It's paid time. It's not as much as I usually get with all the doubles and overtime, but we'd get by."

She takes his hand and threads their fingers together. "It's not the money, sweetheart. It's the time." She shifts her bulk in an attempt to coax the baby from her bladder. "You take three months off, and some jackass with brass buttons on his jacket will decide you can't cut it anymore. They'll send you on your way with a handshake and a kick in the ass, and Dorian will be reassigned or decommissioned."

"Since when do you give a shit about Dorian?" It's sharper than he intends and unwise in the face of their new reconciliation, and he grimaces and draws his thumb across her palm in unspoken apology.

"Right now, I don't. As far as I'm concerned, he's a lying bag of bolts who's watched me suffer twice and never said a goddamned word to ease the pain, and one day, I hope he hurts as much as I did." She hunches as much as her bulbous belly will allow and her voice is thin with bitterness and rage, wormwood and gall on her tongue. "But he's your partner and your friend, and no matter what he's done, he doesn't deserve to get turned off like an obsolete computer." She blinked and sidled and swayed from side to side.

"Rhea, he did what he had to, what he was ordered to. He hated every minute of lying to you. He tried to talk me out of it."

"I can't, John," she says brusquely. "I don't have that much forgiveness to spare." Her bladder finally relents with a sudden gush.

He nods. "All right."

 _Maybe she'll soften,_ he thinks. _Maybe when I've been back a while and the air isn't thick with grief and betrayal, she'll stop thinking of him as that bastard who listened to her wail and watched her rock and cradle a belly that was little more than a bloated pooch and remember him as the guy who came over once a week or so to help her cook a dinner he couldn't eat and shoot the shit with me while I stuffed my face. Maybe she'll remember him as the guy who reminds me of her birthday and our anniversary a week in advance so I don't forget at least a card and some flowers. Maybe when she's not carrying the memory of my abandonment in her belly like a millstone, she'll remember him as the guy who downloaded every book of baby names ever written and spent hours suggesting names for the future Kennex._

 _And if she doesn't, who are you to complain?_ Anna needles inside his head, and gives him a soft, knowing smile that had once made his blood race. _You're a world-champion grudge holder, aren't you, baby? You've hated the MXes with every fiber of your being since one of them left you and Pelham to fend for yourselves._

 _Fucking soulless machines,_ he thinks as Rhea reaches for the toilet paper. _That piece of shit left us for dead._

_That's because you were dead._

_Bullshit. If it had backed us up, I could've gotten us out of there._

_Oh, come on, John, you know better than that. He was gone before you ever got there, hemorrhaging blood from a severed artery and fading with every heartbeat. He never had a chance, and you knew it, but you refused to believe it, accept it, because it meant that you would be alone. No more Daddy, and a mama drifting in the fog of a failing mind. No brothers, no sisters, no close friends. Just little lost John and the heavy mantle of his father's legacy. You didn't want to be alone, so you shut your eyes to the truth that was right in front of you and screamed at the MX because it was easier._

_You were good at that, closing your eyes to the truth. It's how I was able to get so close to you so quickly. You were so lonely, so eager for the mythical happily ever after, and you ignored all the warning signs and silenced the uneasy voice in the back of your mind that sensed the shape of the truth behind my face. You had all the chances in the world to stop me, honey. You just didn't want to, anymore than you wanted to believe that your partner and best friend was going to bleed to death beside an old car in a roil of dust and smoke. So you shut your eyes and opened your heart to a miracle that was never coming and took out your fury on an MX that had more sense than you did._

_Others have a higher statistical probability of survival,_ the goddamn tin can says as Marty slumps against the side of the car and bleeds onto the blacktop. _Are you staying with your partner?_

 _You're damn right I am._ As though there could be any other answer.

 _So noble, John,_ Anna says. _So clear-eyed when it's too little too late._

He thinks of those dead eyes and those pale, gossamer lashes, of the fluid ease with which it had risen once its calculations had been made. It had never hesitated, never looked back as it had turned and left them in the dust and blood. 

_They're never touching my kid,_ he vows. _Not one of those bloodless, pitiless bastards. I can't take the chance that the damn thing won't decide my daughter's life isn't worth saving because someone else down the hall has a higher statistical probability of survival. The only synthetic hands I want touching her are Dorian's. At least he'll know what he's holding._

But he's in no position to be issuing edicts, so he files his resolution away for later. "You ready to get up?"

"Can you help me out of these clothes first? I want to slip into some sweats and a t-shirt."

"Sure." He steadies her on the bowl while she wrangles out of her dress, drawing her arms through the sleeves and tugging it over her head.

She heaves a sigh of relief from within the caul of fabric. "Thank God."

"You should've said something. I'd've brought you home to change."

"If you'd done that, we never would've left." She drapes the shucked dress over the grab bar beside the toilet. "I wanted to spend time with you." She's heavy and amphibious as she sits on the bowl, elbows propped on her quads.

He picks up the dress. "You going to be okay if I let go so I can get you some sweats?"

She nods. "I'll be fine." She picks up his hand and kisses the back, lips soft against his skin and the faint network of veins beneath.

 _Home. I'm home,_ he thinks, and his throat tightens. He blinks to clear his eyes and gives a brusque nod, and then he spins on his heel and carries her dress into the bedroom, dim and cool in the fading afternoon.

He drapes it over the wicker hamper beside the bedroom door so he won't forget to take it to the cleaners in the morning, and then he ambles to the dresser in search of suitable lounge wear. For a moment, he's afraid that everything will have changed in his absence, that she will have rearranged her life to push him out of it, but when he opens the middle drawer, everything is as he left it, down to the spaces left by his departed clothes.

 _She hoped, too,_ he realizes as he stares down at the neat squares of faux pine, and the relief is so acute that he braces himself against the bureau, hand splayed against the top. _She never stopped believing that we could get it together._

He chooses the softest sweats his can find and a Berkeley shirt with a peeling, leprous logo and returns to the bathroom. Rhea is where he left her, though now she's slouched against the tank, ungainly and fatigued.

"Let's get you comfortable," he says. He deposits the t-shirt over the handrail and crouches in front of the toilet. "Hold up your feet if you can."

She readily obliges, feet held feebly aloft like bloated, forlorn tadpoles, and he slips the soft cotton over them and nudges the elastic cuffs over her swollen ankles. "Lot of water weight?"

She narrows her eyes at him. "Are you calling me fat?"

"Of course not," he says stoutly. "You're pregnant. And even if I were, you're supposed to be fat when you're pregnant."

"Smooth, Kennex," she murmurs, but her eyes are soft, softer than her voice, and oh, God, it's so sweet.

"I'm just making sure it's nothing I need to be concerned about," he tells her helplessly-curling toes.

He feels her shrug. "I retain a little water in my feet anyway because of my shitty circulation," she says, a goddess confessing the secrets of the universe from her throne.

He nods. Her poor circulation is no secret to him after years of sharing beds and bodies and shivering at the sudden, frozen caress of her feet beneath the covers.

"The pregnancy has exacerbated it and been hard on the kidneys, but the OBGYN is sure things'll go back to normal once the baby stops bouncing on my internal organs."

"Anything I can do?"

"Just rub them, I guess. Jake usually does it three times a day, but today was a special occasion."

He lowers her feet. "Let's get you into bed, and I'll take care of you, hmm? _Like I should've been all along._

He waits until she sets her feet, and then he stands her up and gropes for the waistband of her underpants with one hand and holds her up with the other.

"Don't throw your back out, sweetheart," she admonishes as he bends and tugs.

He snorts. "I handle assholes on angeldust three times your size," he reminds her. "Besides, better my back than the baby." Once her underwear is up, the sweats follow swift suit.

She wraps her arms around his neck. "I love you, John." It's thick and quiet.

"Hey. Hey. I love you, too. It's all right. We got this. I'm home now, and we're going to be okay, you hear me?"

She snuffles into his shoulder. "Yeah."

He caresses her back. "You believe me?" _I need you to believe me, sweetheart. If you don't, I'm a dead man walking. Dorian will be more alive than I am._

A nod. "Yeah." Muffled but firm, and he closes his eyes and thanks God for quiet miracles.

"All right. That's my girl. I'm going to ease you down so we can get the shirt on."

"Screw the shirt," she mumbles. "My belly itches. Hormones and dry skin."

She doesn't have to ask. "I still have to sit you down for a second." 

He shuffles her around until her knees kiss the edge of her chair , and then he lowers her to her seat. Then he steps to the side, slips his arms around her back and under her knees, and lifts.

"You could've just rolled me out."

His only answer is a grunt as he carries her into the bedroom and lays her on the bed with persnickety care. "You have a lotion you want to use?"

"On the nightstand." She sags against the pillow.

He retrieves the slender golden bottle from the nightstand and sits on the edge of the bed. "This might be cold." The nurse had said the same thing once when he was in the hospital, sedated and frightened and itching in skin that hadn't seen water in seventeen months. He pumps some lotion into his hand and tries to warm it on his fingers before he smears it over taut, dry skin.

She shivers, whether at the coolness of the lotion or the lightness of his touch, he cannot say, and reaches up to unhook her bra. "You don't mind, do you?"

"Since when have I ever objected to seeing my wife's breasts?"

"They're not the same," she points out.

"They're still yours," he answers placidly, and rubs lotion into her skin.  
She's right; they have changed. They're bigger, swollen with milk, and thick, blue veins stand in relief against alabaster skin. The nipples are bigger, too, and flush with blood, and he suspects they're incredibly sensitive. Part of him is tempted to test that theory, but he doubts she's up for a romp at this late date, so he quashes the libidinous impulses and focuses on the task at hand.

This is his first opportunity to truly see her since he moved out. He'd gone with her to every appointment, had sat in the chair across the room, hands fisted between his knees and desperate to touch to reach across the sterile divide and entangle their fingers, but she had been covered by a flimsy paper shift or obscured by the bustling OBGYN with tablet and ultrasound wand in hand. Now she's bared to him, pale and gravid and guileless beneath his solicitous hands. She's beautiful and fragile, and he wants to curl around her and protect her, to bare his fangs to this unforgiving world and hide her until his child comes screaming into the world on a tide of blood and hope.

Of course the medbot chooses that moment to stick its intrusive head in. "Mrs. Kennex," it begins.

"Get the FUCK out of here, you mechanical idiot!" he roars. This is sacred, intimate, and it has no right to it.

The damn thing is unmoved by his outrage. It simply hovers in the doorway, blinking dumbly at her with those lifeless eyes that make his skin crawl. "Mrs. Kennex," it says. "Do you require further assistance?"

"I'm good, Jake," Rhea says. "Why don't you take the rest of the night off?"

"Yes, Mrs. Kennex." It blinks at her a moment longer, and then it retreats.

"Pervert," John growls. "Ogling you like that."

"He's seen it all before. Who do you think helps me with my showers? Besides, Ken doll."

"You've seen it?"

"He's a bit of a nudist."

"God."

He coats her belly, taking care to coat each stretch mark, and for a time, the room is quiet except for the rasp of skin on skin and Rhea's peaceful breathing.

"Can I ask you something?" He smudges a glob of lotion over her bellybutton, which has temporarily become an outie.

She jerks, startled from a doze by the sudden question. "Hm?" She rubs her eyes.

"Sorry. Never mind." Then, "I was just going to ask what made you change your mind?"

She blinks. "About what?"

A diffident shrug. "About coming today."

"The thought crossed my mind the first time you called," she admits. "I wasn't sure I was actually going to do it until we pulled into the parking garage."

He studies her newly-moisturized skin, smooth in the grey light of twilight. "Why?"

"Because I love you."

He raises his gaze to her face. "And what made you decide that?"

"Chocofudge ice cream at three in the morning."

It's his turn to blink in befuddlement. "Ice cream?"

"We'd been separated for almost three months. Most guys would've told me to go fuck myself, but there you were, still thinking about me, still worrying, still trying to take care of me."

"What else was I supposed to do? I'd already walked away from you once. I wasn't going to make that mistake again."

"C'mere, sweetheart," she says, and holds out her arms.

It's a summons he's never been able to refuse. He goes to her with his heart in his throat. Warm arms enfold him and sweet lips find his, and as he nestles his face in the crook of her neck and feels the card of her fingers through his hair, he knows he's home at last.


End file.
